


The Wandering Star

by viviandarkbloom



Series: are we cool, vincent? [4]
Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2019-09-20 10:50:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: Happy holidays, peeps! Thanks for reading. Here we go again....





	1. the rain on the roof

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, peeps! Thanks for reading. Here we go again....

Because it has come late, love has come deeper.

—Ovid, from _Heroides_

  **  
**

The tumult in the heart  
keeps asking questions.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Four Poems, Conversations”

**_1\. ode to Steve McQueen: one year ago_ **

Calendars are meaningless.

 

Caroline comforts herself with this, a mantra for the middle-aged. Calendars are meaningless; internal, imaginary ones even more so. Nothing more than a grid of dismal personal events imposing itself upon the raveling of time. The significance of certain events, however, is completely subjective and among the more compulsive of humans—a category containing her sorry, sorry arse—they are cherry-picked and curated with that particular mindset, which is geared toward helpless anticipation of and dwelling on disaster. Thus the calendar existing in one’s head is a mass of post-it notes clinging haphazardly to an eternal skein of yarn—

 

Post-it notes on yarn? That’s a stupid metaphor, she chastises herself as a pothole on the rutted road leading to the Greenwood Estate sends them rocking and jolts Flora awake. Wincing, she glances at the child strapped securely in her car seat. Apparently Flora has emerged from a nightmare of eating kale; she whines in loud dismay—not crying, thank God—and sleepily rubs her face with a plump fist.

 

“Almost there, darling,” Caroline singsongs in what she hopes is a comforting tone.

 

Flora blinks and looks around. _The crazy lady has kidnapped me again._ With a look of fierce resignation, she fixes her attention upon the landscape. _I fear I will be forced to interact with sheep._

 

In the interim Caroline returns to her dodgy metaphor: These notes on the crazy skein of life detach themselves from importance as others crowd in. The landmark of losing Kate will always loom with significance, of course—she looks at Flora again, who is dragging a sticky toddler palm across the passenger window resulting in a translucently lovely Howard Hodgkin-type smear—but the most recent marker of importance in her life, one of rare hopeful precedence, is this: Twenty-one days without diazepam.

 

It is an uncharacteristically optimistic milestone, but she’ll take it. A hefty dose of gratitude for rising above this contemporary bourgeois life crisis event is given to Gillian, her accomplice in scaling down and kicking the habit, who disposed of the medication, has not said a blessed word to anyone, and now pesters her with well-meaning texts nearly every day. As a thank you, she thought of taking Gillian out for a nice lunch or dinner somewhere, but worried too much about her dining companion grumbling over “posh” places. Knowing Gillian, she probably doesn’t expect any such gesture; she never expects kindness to be reciprocated by anyone, especially those closest to her, and possibly she views what she did for Caroline as merely evening up the score in the department of unspoken family secrets.

 

As she pulls up to the farmhouse she’s counting it again in her head—21 days, 21 is good, 21 is Fibonacci, 21 is the atomic number of scandium, 21 is blackjack, “21!” she says aloud to Flora, who is reluctantly carted to the door because Caroline worries about her running amok and accidently traipsing into errant clumps of sheep shit—and is about to pound on the door, but her fist dives through air and narrowly misses Raff’s displeased face as he opens it.

 

“Here at last,” comes the sarcastic greeting. “Her majesty.”

 

And her insincere apology: “Sorry. I know I’m late.”

 

Insincere because she reluctantly enters chaos: The telly is loud, Calamity is doing laps around the sofa while waving an Xbox console above her head—Flora, unable to resist the toddler insurrection, struggles mightily and breaks free from Caroline to join her comrade in arms—while Robbie stomps about growling and shouting about something presumably to do with his surly bitch wife, who is nowhere in sight.

 

Does Gillian generate chaos by existence alone? Before she can even imagine an answer to that, Calamity starts shouting back at Robbie— _who’s a crazy old bint?_ —while Raff and Alan grimly ignore them and set their desperate collective gaze upon Caroline.

 

Raff says, “She’s hiding in barn.”

 

“We don’t know what’s wrong,” Alan adds in a delicate stage whisper. “She were just being very, er—”

 

“—bitchy,” Raff supplies.

 

“—ah, temperamental, and had a fight with Robbie about, er, something—”

 

“—probably about the fact that she’s a bitch—”

 

“—no, it’s just that she’s—”

 

“—a raving old bitch—”

 

“—no, she is quite sensitive sometimes—”

 

“—for a bitch, that is.”

 

“Tut!” Alan finally barks at his grandson and Raff scowls—this particular sullen moue a genetic inheritance from his mother, the bitch in question.

 

Meanwhile Celia has fetched two thermos mugs of tea from the kitchen, comes into the living room, and presses them into Caroline’s open, helpless hands. “You know what you have to do.”

 

The mission, should she decide to accept it, is to discern the source of the farmer’s distress, alleviate it, and drag her back to the homestead so that she may finish cooking dinner—“otherwise we will be dining vegetarian,” Celia warns in a harsh undertone. A dubious glance is thrown in the general direction of Ellie, who is in the kitchen and has undertaken the cooking of Sunday dinner—an improvisation of chicken casserole sans chicken and with a lot of extra potatoes and carrots merrily and randomly tossed into a large pot. Caroline briefly wonders why Robbie has not seized the moment to display his supposed culinary skills. After badgering her so many times—half-serious, half in jest, sometimes gently, sometimes demanding—why she remains married to him, Gillian had finally come up with a reason of sorts: _He makes a nice roast._ But currently he is rendered helpless by young children, who now try to distract him from his foul mood by forcing him to play something on the Xbox with them; at least this is how she interprets Calamity repeatedly whacking him in the shins with the console.

 

Celia looks back into the kitchen again. “All those potatoes!” she hisses, aghast. “Like Ireland during the famine!”

 

“It wouldn’t kill you lot to eat less meat—” Caroline begins.

 

“That’s Greg talk,” Raff accuses, which is quite uncalled for, but then Alan gives her a rather beseeching look that seals the deal and her fate.

 

She sighs. “All right, all right—” Before she can even think of pulling off a Matthew McConaughey impression—and she wouldn’t do it half as well as Gillian does—she is gently propelled out the front door by Raff, who murmurs, “there’s a good lass” as it slams shut behind her.

 

Thus armed, Caroline trudges out to the barn while thinking that the first thing Gillian will do is give her shit for not properly spiking the tea with the bottle of rum she keeps in the cupboard hidden behind a wall of canned baked beans. With a furrowing of the brow she wonders what is wrong with the damned woman this time and, abruptly, stops walking. She never asked what Gillian did with the pills that she confiscated that day. Wouldn’t start popping it herself, would she? No, she wouldn’t do that. While Gillian has confessed to familiarity with a lot of illegal substances in her youth, as a mum she is virulently opposed to most drug intake; recently, she has complained at length to Caroline about a mate of Raff’s who had gotten involved in selling meth. She didn’t want Raff hanging out with him, and the issue developed into a bone of contention between mother and son.

 

If she had expected Gillian to be in a genuinely awful mood, it’s a relief to find her contentedly absorbed in work: hunched over a generator with a spanner in hand, acknowledging Caroline’s presence without a glance, her grin shadowed in profile.

 

“Spiked?” she asks.

 

“Nope.”

 

“Pity.”

 

She knows the routine well; they both do. As Gillian had declared so many years ago, Caroline is the Godfather, the fixer of the family. The only problem is that she does not have a legion of Sicilian foot soldiers at her disposal, so tea, wine, and bitchiness are her only weapons; and yet, long have they served her well. Who needs guns and garroting?

 

“Congratulations.” Caroline hands her a mug of tea. “You have them all scared half to death of you.”

 

“Good.” With easy grace, Gillian hoists herself up to sit on an empty area of the workbench, and rolls her eyes at Caroline’s silent chastisement. “Ah, fuck off, don’t need that look from you too.”

 

In amiable silence, they drink. Caroline itemizes the deceptive quiet: the distant bleat and scuffle of sheep in a pen, the wind knocking about a tarp over an unspecified lump of something outside (frankly, she is afraid to ask what it is), the smattering of rain above them that stops as soon as it begins, Gillian slurping tea while swinging her legs and the coveralls she wears today bring out the blue of her eyes with such vivid magnificence—and you did not just think that, Caroline tells herself.

 

Finally, Gillian admits what’s bothering her: “Think Steve’s going deaf,” she says softly.

 

Caroline sips from the thermos mug, purses her lips, and offers a stoic but understanding nod. “Steve,” she echoes.

 

Up on an emotional high wire, Gillian’s voice tightens as tears gather in those too-blue eyes. “Yeah.”

 

Caroline says nothing because her brain is desperately scanning the Shag Database: an incomplete, informal list of Gillian’s past romantic conquests in which input and intake of said data was usually filtered through alarming amounts of red wine and an admixture of repulsion, fascination, and knee-jerk judgments. There were, of course, the ones she knew about: Paul and Ollie and John—all linked together like that, they sounded like some fuckawful folkish hipster band. _Now on tour supporting their new disc: The Greenwood Blues!_ Then there were the others she hadn’t met, hadn’t known about. Neil the widowed postman, who cried when they had it off; Gillian thought it was because she was the first woman he’d been with since his wife died but no, he admitted proudly, he just felt things very, very deeply. Tony the security guard, who lived above a fish and chips shop; she was peckish the entire time and faked an epic orgasm just so she could leave early and grab some chippies. Ken the bank manager who liked to be spanked; she did it to him once, couldn’t stop laughing after, and as a result got kicked out of his flat at two in the morning, whereupon she went home and had a wank while watching Angelina Jolie in one of the _Tomb Raider_ movies on late-night telly (“Daniel Craig in the shower was a bonus, top notch film, that”) and naturally Caroline had been more intrigued about the wanking than the spanking.

 

But Steve. Was there a Steve? Who was Steve?

 

“When I call,” Gillian is saying shakily, “he don’t answer.”

 

Old Caroline would have opted for the cruelly obvious: _Yeah, ducking your calls, he’s just not into you, silly twat._ But when life kicks the shit out of you, it can bring about a more thoughtful, empathetic approach when dealing with the convoluted emotional and romantic life of your stroppy slapper stepsister.

 

“I see how that would be upsetting,” Caroline begins carefully. Thinking she sounds like a therapist, she is silently, secretly pleased at herself: _Look at me being supportive! Go Team Caroline!_ “But, ah, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions just yet, don’t you think?”

 

Sniffling and swiping at her nose, Gillian looks confused. “Why?”

 

“Maybe, well, maybe his mobile isn’t working or something?”

 

The confusion on Gillian’s face curdles into outright anger and Caroline knows she has not only stepped in it but is, in fact, sinking straight to the bottom with frightening alacrity.

 

“You f-f-fucking—” Gillian shakes her head and seethes in such a splendid fashion that Caroline’s thighs twitch. She slams down the thermos mug. “You are so—fucking—ridiculous.”

 

“Oh, come on,” Caroline whines, “now what?”

 

“Who do you think Steve is?”

 

“I don’t know,” she confesses.

 

Gillian is incredulous. “You don’t?”

 

“No.” Caroline nibbles her lip and, as she typically did during her Sixth Form trigonometry course, throws out a desperately rushed Hail Mary of an answer: “Was he that barista we saw at Costa that one time, the one you said had an ass of a Greek god?”

 

“ _He’s my f-f-fucking sheepdog, Caz._ Steve McQueen!” Gillian flings an arm and points in the general direction of the great outdoors where, presumably, the Great McQueen was patrolling the gently swelling verdant hills of the Calder Valley, gazing serenely into the stark horizon, and eagerly licking his empty nutsack.

 

“Oh.” Then, adding brightly, with relief, Caroline exclaims, “That’s right!”

 

But Gillian is having none of it. “ _My dog!_ ”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“My bloody dog! Probably spend more time with him than any human being.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Caroline repeats, and then pauses. “But that does explain a lot.”

 

“Fuck off! You thought he was some rando I shagged!”

 

“Well, I—”

 

“You never change. You know that? You never pay attention to a _single bloody thing_ I say, it’s all gibberish to you, and after all this time you _still_ think I’m just some big old slapper anyway, and don’t tell me it’s ‘not a word,’ I’ve heard it enough thrown in my general vicinity—if people are using it, it’s a _fucking word_.”

 

“Okay, all right, I’m sorry.”

 

“ _Language always evolves._ ”

 

“All right! Christ’s sake, Noam Chomsky, calm down.”

 

“You’re just like Robbie.” Contrite, abject horror flashes across Gillian’s face the second it flies out of her mouth, and that serves as a better apology than words ever would. Still, she hunches over her tea and mumbles a _sorry_ while Caroline wonders how, despite those roast-making skills, Gillian remains married to someone she holds in such glaringly obvious contempt.

 

They take a moment to regroup.

 

Caroline makes the first move: “I’m sorry I forgot.” She gives the tea in the mug an agitated swish as Gillian’s expression softens. “Seriously. I must’ve blocked out his name because he tried to hump me that first time I came here.” No sooner had they all sat down at the table for lunch that day than the beast scampered in and latched onto her leg; the feverishly stupid brown eyes gazing up at her so reminiscent of John that then and there, she decided that regardless of what happened with Kate, she really, really, really needed to get moving on that divorce. Perhaps, she thinks, she should be grateful to the dog.

 

“Oh. God. Forgot about that,” Gillian admits.

 

“I mean, he’s neutered, isn’t he? Why does he still do that?”

 

“Bunch of reasons. Dominance. Marking territory. Shit like that.”

 

“Typical male.”

 

“Yep.” Gillian chortles gleefully. “But then he took a shine to your mum. Remember?”

 

“Guess he likes them old too.” Caroline snorts. The very same day after his unsuccessful tryst with Caroline, Steve then set his sights on Celia; his ardor nearly knocked her to the floor as she cried, _Gillian, what on earth is wrong with this animal?_

 

“Grand-MILFs.”

 

They bust out into raucous cackling. As Gillian doubles over in mirth, Caroline seeks support from the workbench, dimly aware that she has to pee and if this continues, an accident may be imminent, so she straightens and attempts adult behavior whilst failing miserably: “All right all right all right.”

 

“Oh ho ho!” Gillian laughs again. “You dare to McConaughey in front of me!”

 

“I know, you do it better. Okay. Come on, then. You’ve got to come back in and finish dinner. Your father will perish if he has to eat vegetarian.”

 

“They let Ellie in the kitchen, did they? No wonder they want me back there.”

 

She offers a steadying hand as Gillian slides off the workbench. Not that it’s actually needed, but the heat and strength of her touch startles and pleases; it’s a better drug than the fucking diazepam ever was because it’s real. It makes Caroline feel as if life is finally snapping back into focus, and when Gillian playfully sways and gently bumps into her shoulder, the initial shock of it passes and then it’s wonderful and right, to allow simple affection bloom between them again after so long a mutually imposed—but all too necessary—estrangement.

 

“M-maybe—” Gillian mumbles.

 

Caroline stiffens. Even after all this time, she always fears what Gillian offers.

 

Rather than an impulsive, ill-advised proposition to shag on a haystack, she gets Gillian’s loveable-fuckup grin instead. “Maybe, ah—you could make dinner?”

 

“What a way to treat your guests.”

 

“You know you cook better than I do.”

 

“Flattery will get you nowhere. But I’ll help. Set the table. Pour you wine.”

 

“You’re a real sous chef, Caz.”

 

“Keep it up and I’ll ask Mum to help you instead.”

 

“Christ. Would rather eat whatever Ellie’s cooking.”

 

As they head back to the house, the sporadic rain starts up again and they make a dash for it. Awaiting his mistress, Steve McQueen is at the door of the house, merrily spinning about in a circle as he chases his own tail.

 

Sighing, Gillian shakes her head. “You bloody idiot.”

**_2\. black and blue: one year later_ **

 

She stands in the doorway and yells for a dog that cannot hear her. It starts to rain.

 

Steve McQueen is fourteen years old. Gillian claims he is the oldest active sheepdog in the valley; she has gotten into numerous arguments at her pub about this ridiculous declaration, nitpicking, hair-splitting, ale-spitting disputes with an array of half-drunk tosspots about (1) how effective a deaf and partially blind sheepdog could be, and (2) if he is really that old or if she’s just bullshitting. There is no denying the grizzled glory of dog himself, his black-gray mass of fur and the patch of white spanning his broad chest. When he wakes after a long nap he walks at first with a stately wobble, like a vicar pickled in sherry after a daylong bender. Gillian likes to refer to him as _my longest successful relationship._

Caroline, who qualifies for the current middling, muddling ill-defined romantic relationship—and even these hesitant qualifiers merit some pause—accepts the supremacy of the dog over her position in the household. Beggars cannot be choosers, especially when the beggar in question shows up Saturday morning after an impulsive lie to her entire family and a flurry of suggestive texts, among them _I want to fuck you against your headboard again and again and again—_ punctuation lost in a lusty rush of typing and thank God for spellcheck.

 

 _I love spellcheck!_ This giddily exclaimed to John once upon a time, during the halcyon early years of mobiles. In turn he only sneered at her with droopy disdain and muttered, _that’s so you._

 

Luckily everyone at home was gullible enough to believe it entirely necessary for her to do paperwork in an empty school on a Saturday, so here she is: naked, eyes closed, half-asleep in Gillian’s bed—listening to rain, a woman bellowing for a dog that cannot hear, a crack of a back door like a pistol that otherwise would disturb save that she’s quite accustomed to it by now, a bark of a wet dog as he trots inside. She pictures him slowly, carefully settling his old bones in his rumpled bed by the sputtering, dim glow of the fireplace, then imagines Gillian’s bare feet lightly traversing the cozy danger of the kitchen’s wooden floor in deft avoidance of splinters and nail heads. Then the thump-creak of her ascent on the stairs, the bedroom door opening, the zipper of the jeans undone before they plop on the floor, the breeze caused by the blanket being pulled back and finally—finally!—Caroline can reclaim her favorite resting spot: the curve of Gillian’s hip, not too broad, not too small, its dip a perfect spoonful of soft and strong, fleshy and firm. She could sleep there for hours more, save for the gentle persistence of Gillian stroking her hair, a tactile alarm clock that she blissfully ignores.

 

Above them, the rain roars. One story closer to the sky results in a light year trip to the edge of heaven, to a thunderous apocalyptic dome over their heads that cradles them with thrilling vulnerability as it threatens to bring down the house and carry them toward the sea. _Blow your house down._ Which is what they’ve did for the past two hours: Fuck without a care for the storm above, while brewing a storm of their own. There is an always-unspoken quest for dominance that works to their mutual benefit. Somehow, even in her roughness, Gillian always achieves the perfect pitch of tenderness: she sinks her teeth into Caroline’s shoulder, desperately rakes skin with her blunt nails, then kisses softly and fucks slowly, the teasingly exact and persistent curl of her fingers always brings about a maddening climax. Black and blue, it’s the only way she loves. As a result Caroline’s concept of love has collapsed, folding beautifully like a star and sinking into every action, every word between them. Ever since they’ve started up again, the stakes have been heightened; while it is a natural accompaniment to the reckless euphoria of a winning hand, now Caroline juggles a young child and another lover—even if that other lover is currently occupied across the ocean—and Gillian is still in the process of shedding a husband, and all of that requires boundaries and time and careful navigation of undefined, unspoken feelings.

 

No. No thinking, her poor over-stimulated and exhausted brain demands. But Gillian shifts and sighs—a happy one, melodic and light—and playfully drums Caroline’s bare shoulder. “You awake yet?”

 

“No.”

 

“Liar.”

 

“Yes.” With that confession, she hopes to be granted leave to fall back into sleep—just a little bit longer—but then it begins.

 

“‘It is marvelous to wake up together,’” Gillian says slowly, in that particular way she has when reading aloud, savoring both the feast of words and then the sweet aftertaste of meaning that limns her mouth.

 

Caroline smiles, even though she opens her eyes to the disappointment of Gillian not completely naked: she’s kept on a t-shirt against the chill and is propped against two pillows while cradling a book, the bottom of which presses into her stomach. The bones of a new bookcase reside in the barn—planks of old varnished pine salvaged by Harry from some estate sale, awaiting animation into a stalwart shelving unit. In the meantime, a few select volumes have migrated into the house and reside by her bed. Sometimes she reads to Caroline extracts of histories here and scraps of novels there, lines of poetry and epigrams; it’s tinder for foreplay, smoldering in the afterglow.

 

She continues: “‘At the same minute; marvelous to hear / The rain begin suddenly all over the roof.’”

 

“Who’s that?” Caroline asks around a yawn.

 

“Elizabeth Bishop.”

 

“Who’s she?”

 

“Poet.”

 

Caroline giggles into Gillian’s hip. “No shit, Sherlock.”

 

Gillian laughs self-consciously. “It’s, well, it’s—don’t know much about her except what they say in the introduction here, in-in the book—she was American, lived in Brazil for a while, and oh—” A dramatic pause. “She was a lesbian.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Oh, _now_ you’re paying attention.”

 

“I’ve _been_ paying attention. Go on.”

 

“All right.” She clears her throat:

 

“‘To feel the air suddenly clear

As if electricity had passed through it

From a black mesh of wires in the sky

All over the roof the rain hisses

And below, the light falling of kisses.’”

 

Impulsively Caroline grabs the book, slaps it on the nightstand, gets a growly _oi_ of disapproval from Gillian, and offers no light falling of kisses but rather the steady, intense downpour of just one. Gillian arches into her and welcomes the deluge, deepens the kiss—the rain beating on the roof not unlike the rush of blood roaring in her ears and through her veins—and breaks it off only for want of air and retention of sanity.

 

“Jesus fuck.” As if she’d been sucking on a massive, mind-blowing spliff rather than Caroline’s tongue, Gillian exhales violently and, deliriously unfocused, she stares helplessly at the ceiling. “You’ve got to stop kissing like that.”

 

“Really?” Caroline’s mouth sets a course for her neck, for a certain spot that makes Gillian gasp girlishly and grind whorishly—was it directly below the ear, or closer to the shoulder? No matter, she’ll find it. She’s a reckless, fearless explorer, like some square-jawed bloke on _Star Trek_ looking for the Death Star—no wait, that might be from something else, but damned if she’s going to ask Gillian about that now when she’s so close to the spot, so close because Gillian squirms underneath her and wraps a strong leg around Caroline’s waist. “ _Fuck._ Caz—you have to—”

 

Caroline nips warningly at the strong column of her throat. “Don’t say it.”

 

Gillian’s defiance is wavering, but touching. “I will.”

 

“Don’t.”

 

“You h-have to—you—”

 

“No.”

 

“—you have to—face—the—” Finally, it is forced out: “—the Mummy Mafia.”

 

“Ugh, fuck,” Caroline spits, and it’s not a good _fuck_. Defeated, she rolls off Gillian and onto her stomach. Chin propped on a fist, she stares at the old wooden headboard, which did indeed get the promised workout today. Alas, the idyll must end. She has to pick up Flora from a playdate, a task that will require interaction with any number of young mothers and in a social arena where she will once again be the sole representative of her kind: tired, middle-aged, gay. There needs to be asylum somewhere in the world, some queer country where she could flee from these types of women, thin and polished and thinking that makeup and organic hemp and pilates constitute a way of life. _Give me your tired, your gay, your huddled masses yearning for brunch cocktails._ In equal measure, she fears and loathes them; thus Gillian—forever unearthing useful parallels from _The Godfather_ for application in real life—dubbed this dreaded power clique the Mummy Mafia.

 

“I think that could be our safe word,” Gillian says, laughing. “Well, safe phrase: Mummy Mafia.”

 

“Shit, stop saying it. Anyway, do we really need a safe word?”

 

Lightly Gillian slaps her ass, not unlike the way Caroline has seen her slap the rump of a slow, waddling ewe; regardless, the pleasant sting prompts a pleasurable gasp of “ooh.”

 

“Judging by that reaction, reckon not. Now get on with you.” While groping for her mobile on the nightstand she knocks over the Elizabeth Bishop book, curses, and then flashes the dirty cracked mobile at Caroline. Predictably, the lock screen of her phone shows her late lamented ancient ram, Bertolucci, the time of 12:49 hanging off his woolly face like a surreal pair of glasses, perhaps something that Elton John would wear on a particularly naff day. “You’ve got less than half an hour to shower.”

 

Mention of showering reminds her that she forgot to bring along either soap or shower gel of her own. Gillian still uses the strange macho-man shower gel that Raff had purchased a while ago; when Caroline observed that the supply of it seemed a never-ending, eternal toxic fountain of masculinity, she guiltily confessed to owning a case of the stuff. She had found it on sale at a pharmacy—60% markdown!—and then herself a victim of vicious castoff capitalism: When it doubt, mark it down, some knobhead will buy it. While Raff had taken some when he moved out, there were still bottles and bottles of it shamefully stored under the sink.

 

One last seduction attempt: She curls an arm around Gillian’s waist, pulls her closer, instigates further furious neck-nuzzling. “I don’t know how you manage it,” she murmurs, nose squashed against very pleasing, sweet-smelling skin, as Gillian shivers at the contact. “That shit shower gel is like gas fumes, and yet you always smell so, so incredible.”

 

“You’re a chemist. You’ll figure it out someday. Now g-go on. Got things to do. Work. Can’t lollygag about on weekends like you do.”

 

“If you’ve so much to do, why are you _lollygagging_ about in bed with me?”

 

“Can’t be a bad hostess.”

 

“You served me wine out of a jam jar today.”

 

Gillian kisses her rather sweetly. “But I gave you the best jam jar.” Then again, with a lingering finish, a gentle tug of her lower lip. “You better go. Flora’ll be waiting on you.”

 

Flora is the guilt-trip that always works. The last playdate pickup, she was late and arrived at a huge, charmingly rustic renovated farmhouse (solar panels, stream-fed ponds, repurposed flagstones from a dissolved priory) to find Flora upset at her tardiness, the child in tears and tended to by an apologetically embarrassed Mafia Mum (Hayley, 32, “perfume designer and lipstick curator,” married to a software engineer). After copious hugs, apologies, and biscuits all was forgiven and forgotten, but Caroline’s excoriating guilt carried through the night and well into the following day, even though Flora woke her the next morning by happily barging into her bedroom and flinging a stuffed animal at her head, a sure sign of affection. Nothing says _I love you_ like getting struck in the face by a plush hippo.

 

Unless perhaps it is a sheep farmer cradling your face and stroking your cheek with a callused thumb while gazing at you with a raw intensity that makes you feel naked, even though you already are naked, so it achieves the impossible effect of making you feel _even more naked._ A glorious mess of words and feelings threaten to spill out of Caroline’s mouth until her frantic censorious mind takes over, bleating _hippo hippo hippo_ , _you must rescue your child and her hippo from the Mummy Mafia._

 

Caroline bolts out of bed and scoops up her clothes.

 

“Wait,” Gillian says.

 

“W-what?” Is stammering contagious? Caroline wonders.

 

“Forgot to tell you something.”

 

“I know there’s a new _Predator_ movie out.”

 

“No,” Gillian replies softly. She sits up, crosses her legs. “You’re beautiful.”

 

Her mind goes blank, her ass is cold; she can feel goose bumps rising back there.

 

With a quick duck of her head, Gillian grins shyly. “Now go fuck off and take a shower.”

 

Caroline dashes through the drafty hallway to the bathroom. As usual, the hot water cuts off too early in the shower and the hair dryer dies too soon. Dressed and coiffed as best she can manage, and almost ready to leave, she circles back to the bedroom to retrieve her own mobile and finds Gillian sound asleep, the open book winged and feathered across her chest.

 

Years later on a trip to France, Gillian will read the poem in its entirety to her—while nestled between her legs on a chaise lounge in the garden of the house where they stayed, as Caroline rubbed aloe vera gel along her sunburnt shoulders, the day cloudy and hot, an empty bottle of Chablis toppled at their feet—including the last lines that will weave an indelible enchantment around that time, that trip, that woman:

 

_The world might change to something quite different,_

_As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking_

_Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking._


	2. that’s just not a successful shavasana

>  Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.
> 
> —Sophocles, _Electra_ (Anne Carson, trans.)
> 
>  

Today’s Mummy Mafia hostess: Padma, 36, mother of Cyril, resident of Wetherby, owner of three yoga/pilates studios in the area, and married to a solicitor who used to work with Sacha—as Caroline discovered during an awkward exchange early on in their acquaintance during which Padma’s lovely gelled eyebrows contorted with comic-book violence at a casual _oh you may know my girlfriend_ name drop. This in turn initiated a mobile text interrogation of the globetrotting entrepreneur herself, who was still in New York and offered guilty, run-on clarification of the matter:

_ok so I shagged her bff a few years ago it was not a good time for me_

While Caroline struggled to interpret what, precisely, the phrase “not a good time” might modify, Sacha followed up:

_I mean the sex was good but I was in a bad place emotionally and acted like a twat_

Which was not what she had hoped to hear. Then the following trickle stream of nervous babbling texts over the span of two minutes:

_I mean sex with you is better you obvs know what you’re doing_

_you know what I mean_

_your tongue is priceless like mastercard_

_I don’t mean to be trivial_

_oh wow there is a blind man playing accordion on the 1 train he’s got a cane with a wheelie!_

_jesus I hope my mobile is never hacked or stolen_

_please tell me you’re not freaked out_

If anything, the entire textual exchange yielded crucial clarification: She was sleeping with not only Original Recipe Bisexual Gillian Greenwood, but also a Disturbingly Uncanny Lesbian Version of Gillian Greenwood. Additionally it served up the dreaded reminder that Sacha’s inevitable return would require a conversion with the latter concerning a status update on the former. The mere thought of it triggered an acid reflux attack as viciously potent as one she had recently after consuming Greg’s forty-clove garlic soup. Except that it was not acid roiling through her gut, but anxiety.

Is there such a thing as anxiety reflux? she had wondered, while staring at the bulbous blue string of texts on the mobile screen and refraining mightily from pecking out a sarcastic response to all of it: _Remind me again, which notch on the bedpost am I?_ No, instead she calmly delivered a canned, cool-girlfriend response on the mobile: _It’s fine, not freaked out at all, just curious!_ As a rule she hated exclamation points, but read somewhere that periods in texts were imbued with negative meaning, and sought to assuage with the most overcompensating of punctuation marks.

Perhaps that was how she should approach the current situation, Caroline thinks as she is led through today’s Mummy Mafia Manse. With a simple, declarative text to Sacha, rich with exclamation points: _Hey guess what I’m sleeping with the Slapper now too!! Please tell me you’re not freaked out!!_

If Padma truly considered romantic association with Sacha a black mark on Caroline’s character—and Christ knows what she would think about Caroline mucking about with a sullen sheep farmer fond of torn jeans, threadbare flannel, cold pizza, and horror films from the 1970s—she kept any disapproval well under wraps. It helped that she was quite fond of Flora, perhaps because they were the only females of color in the glaringly white world of the Yorkshire Mummy Mafia. Flora was also remarkably easygoing and open to Padma’s futile attempts at orchestrating yoga sessions among toddlers, and that, Padma informs her, is precisely what all her young charges have been up to today.

While Caroline may not be a toddler anymore, she knows a shitty play date when she hears it.

“Flora is a master of the basic poses!” Padma says excitedly, while leading Caroline through the house. “She’s so good at it all.”

“Yes. Her dad is quite the fan of the yoga,” Caroline says. In an attempt to redirect an unintentional but appreciative focus on Padma’s gently swaying arse, she stares further downward to silently covet the exquisite Persian runner along the mahogany floor.

“If you don’t mind my saying, your living situation is _so_ civilized, I admire you _so_ much for maintaining such balance and harmony in a potentially tricky arrangement—I know Greg is very sweet, though.”

“He’s my bitch,” she says offhandedly, an assessment Greg actually embraced, and with a strange kind of satisfaction no less, as if she were conferring on him an honorary status of womanhood. “It’s like we’re homies!” he had cried, and she felt oddly affectionate toward him in that moment, possibly because his slang usage was even more dated than hers. Maybe it is a weird compliment, she thinks, considering how often she has called Gillian a bitch over the years—and vice versa. All the begrudging complexities of love and need and respect reclaimed and bottled up into one potentially explosive word.  

Then Padma stops so abruptly that Caroline narrowly misses happily crash-landing into that luscious and toned yoga-and-pilates figure. “You know, Caroline—” she begins darkly.

“Yes?”

“Men _are_ bitches and should be treated as such.”

Obviously Padma’s use of _bitch_ is not laced with as much ambivalent affection and ruminative bullshit. Caroline knows if she dares to ask what prompted such a statement, she will end up in Padma’s flawless kitchen drinking hemp tea and listening to a raging, heteronormative lament on her husband in the specific—in another text Sacha had called him a pussy hound, so Caroline did not know if admiration or disdain colored the phrase—and the male species at large. So she holds her tongue as Padma whips around and stalks through the hallway, happy to follow that perfect bouncing ass—you had the best ass in Yorkshire this morning, don’t be greedy, she violently chastises herself—until they reach the large playroom and the hostess trills with great fraudulent gusto, “Flora! Your mum is here.”

All the bored and tired children have decamped to the telly area of the playroom except Flora, who lay flat on her back in the middle of the room, leg bent at an odd angle, but otherwise nailing the corpse pose except for the fact that she was sound asleep and drooling a bit.

“Oh,” Padma clucks, dismayed. “She fell asleep.”

“That’s all right. I’m sure she’ll nap later.”

“No, I mean, that’s just not a successful shavasana.”

“Looks grand to me. Namaste, bitches!”

“That’s not how it works—”

“Flora, darling! Time to go!”

Roused from a palatial nirvana, Flora opens her eyes, blinks at Caroline, and says “ugh” quite clearly. Indeed, she sleepily _ughs_ her way through their leave-taking: while pulling on trainers and a jumper, offering _ugh_ ing waves of farewells to the other children, croaking _ugh_ at the hopelessly smitten Cyril, who for weeks now has given her drawings of anteaters (his favorite animal) covered with little hearts, responding with _ughs_ as Caroline quizzes her with maternal due diligence on her day as they walk to the Jeep Cherokee, and grunting out a final _ugh_ topped with a burp—“Saving the best for last, I see,” Caroline says—as she is strapped into a car seat.

Car-seat prep is such a sweetly playful ritual between them that Caroline knows she will acutely mourn the day that Flora no longer needs the seat. While she stretches across the seat to make the final adjustments and closure of the strap, Flora leans forward as far as she can, testing the bonds of the seats, resting a warm cheek against her mother’s head, and tugging at irresistible tendrils of blonde hair so close at hand.

This time, however, instead of initiating the exchange of cooing affectionate giggles, Flora recoils and _ugh_ s again. “Stinky,” she says.

Hand on the car door, Caroline straightens. “You burped, not me.”

“No. Stinky.” To clarify, Flora thrusts out her arm, tiny finger pointed at her mother.

There’s nothing like getting a _j’accuse_ from a toddler that triggers one’s own innate childishness: “You’re ridiculous. I am not.”

Then she freezes, horrified. Is it sex? She cannot possibly smell of sex. Surely the industrial strength of that shower gel decimated any kind of shag reek—she digs the heel of her hand into her forehead. Of course. That’s what Flora is getting a heady whiff of: that bloody awful Jack Black shower gel.

“Yaaas,” Flora drawls. For months Greg has been trying to get Flora to say _yas, queen_ ; so far she has the first part down pat.

“Noooo,” Caroline retorts in similar fashion, which sends Flora into great cackles of delight.

All the same, she will not let it go. She chants _stinky stink stink_ at her mother all the way home—and really, Caroline thinks dismally, I deserve it, I should have been baking biscuits or doing bloody yoga or plotting out an extensive, long-term academic curriculum plan for my youngest child instead of fucking a farmer all morning. All she wants to do when they get home is perform a wine-infused shavasana on the couch because, blessedly, they will be alone for the rest of the day: Greg is promoting his latest anatomically incorrect graphic novel at a comic-book store in Leeds and Lawrence is weekending with Angus. The afternoon is ripe for napping.

But to her unhappy surprise, when they arrive home she finds her mother and Alan loitering with geriatric intent in her kitchen.

Alan booms out a “Hello, sweetheart!” and Celia follows up with, “Did you have fun?”

Caroline assumes the usual cloak of maternal invisibility has settled upon her once again and that these cheerful conversational openers are meant not for her, but her daughter; the twinkliness of their overall demeanor only confirms it.

Bypassing these niceties—a wonderful thing about childhood is that no expects one to follow the rote politesse of casual conversation—Flora unfortunately brings to the attention of the old people the grave matter rocking her three-year-old world: “Mummy stinky!”

Message delivered, she hits up Alan for a biscuit and Alan, who is elbow-deep in a large tin of expensive biscuits, cheerfully obliges.

“Stinky?” Celia echoes. “Were you trying to do the yoga this morning? Greg says you sweat a lot trying to do the hoochie-coochie pose or whatever it is.”

“No, I wasn’t doing yoga,” Caroline snaps as the mobile pings and she fishes it out of her handbag. It’s a grouchy text from Gillian: _Whyd you let me fall asleep? I was out for nearly two fucking hours._ Hastily she clears the message from the screen.

It is just the distraction that Celia needs to successfully broach the penumbra of Caroline’s head bitch defense shield, but before the latter can even manage to shoot a defensive laser-beam glare at the former, Celia sniffs at her with the theatricality of a Hercule Poirot in an Am Dram production. “You do smell awful!”

“Celia!” Alan never fails to be properly aghast at his wife’s overall lack of a filter.

“No, really,” Celia persists. “Did you switch soap?”

“Yeah. Something new I tried.” Which was true enough.

“You smell like a male midlife crisis that has been curdling in a pub for twenty years.”

“You’re reusing material now, love,” Alan says to her, then to Caroline: “Said that about Harry t’other week.”

“That’s not nice,” Caroline says.

Of course, her mother will never be distracted from her primary mission in life: shaming and accusation. “It smells like bad cologne." Her eyes narrow. "Are you sleeping with a man?”

“For God’s sake!” Alan implores.

Caroline bursts into laughter. Which, of course, prompts Flora to spit out a portion of half-chewed biscuit and join in. “Are you mad?”

Celia crosses her arms. “My sixth sense is tingling.”

“Perhaps your compression stockings are too tight.”

“You swear on all that you hold holy?” Ever the eternal disbeliever, Celia arches a doubting, challenging eyebrow.

From the wine rack Caroline retrieves a ridiculously expensive bottle of Bordeaux. She bought it shortly after her divorce was finalized, meant to drink it with Kate in celebration, discovered that Kate was not terribly fond of heavy reds, resolved to convince her otherwise—but, of course, was never granted the chance for that sweet persuasion. Now it sits regally aloof in the wine rack, awaiting a suitable occasion for corkage and resisting the lusty looks it receives from Gillian, who eyes it with the same voracious intensity usually reserved for (1) a cordless nail gun that has prompted a lot of unsubtle hints about how it would make an excellent birthday gift, (2) the ass of her favorite barista at Costa, the one who calls her “farmer lady,” and (3) Caroline’s cleavage, apparently peerless among tits.

With great mock solemnity, Caroline holds up the Bordeaux in her left hand, places the right upon her heart. “I swear I am not sleeping with a man.”

Alan guffaws.

“You’re not funny,” Celia says.

“And you’re in the wrong bloody house. Why are you two here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The Aga makes better tea,” Celia says smoothly, just as Alan mumbles guiltily, “We were stealing biscuits.”

When they finally leave nearly an hour later, Flora falls asleep on the sofa and Caroline can finally reply to Gillian’s text: _Sorry you can’t keep up._ A cheap shot, given that the mere thought of Gillian’s average workday exhausts her. She does not even expect an immediate response to the text because Gillian had said something about attending an auction in the afternoon, and Caroline did not know sheep auctions were a thing, as were, apparently, _auction market reports_ —something that Gillian had gone on about in a mumbly, distracted stream of consciousness for several minutes until Caroline finally got her jeans off. She settles on the sofa next to Flora, mobile dangling loosely in her grip, and closes her eyes. As she drifts off she thinks she should put the mobile on the table before she really falls asleep, and how much is a bloody cordless nail gun anyway?—when the phone rings shrilly, indicating an actual call instead of a text, and she is so startled she drops it on the floor.

“Ugh,” Flora grunts.

She picks it up and answers without glancing at the caller ID—and is stunned to actually hear Sacha’s casual purr: “Hey.”

Caroline sits up ramrod straight. Her back twinges. “Hi! How are you?”

Half-awake now, Flora blinks suspiciously, detecting the fraudulent and frantic enthusiasm in her voice.

“Great. Yeah. You?”

“Great," Caroline echoes helplessly. "What’s—”

“I’m home,” Sacha says. “Flew in last night. Well, not home-home just yet. In London tonight, driving back tomorrow.” As if to dispel any lingering concerns that Caroline may have regarding the London shag buddy, she adds hastily, “David insisted on having dinner tonight. I suspect he’s going to tell me he’s leveled up on the midlife crisis and that his 27-year-old girlfriend is pregnant.”

“Your ex is always more entertaining than mine.”

“The grass is always greener, dear.”

“Well,” Caroline says, hoping it conveys the proper note of pleasant surprise and not the lingering precedent to _shit_ or _fuck_.

Sacha barks out a laugh. “I’m not sure that sounded pleased.”

“No, no—I’m glad,” Caroline replies. “Glad you’re back. It’s just a surprise. You were coming back next weekend, I thought.”

“Yeah, that was the plan. But I think things are settled enough with the company, we made great progress getting things set up and integrated and—oh God, I’m babbling corporate at you.”

“That’s all right.” Caroline laughs. “At any rate, the time really flew by.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” What else is there to say? Even if she doesn’t tell Sacha straightaway, the truth is written on her body. She’s marked by Gillian—remembers her windswept in the Jeep’s rear view mirror a week ago, the stoicism of her goodbye then as unnervingly intense as her lovemaking and in fact, was a reverberating coda of their tryst—in ways more potent than forty cloves of garlic, toxic shower gel, or even a deep dark Bordeaux: the slow blossom of thigh bruises like time-lapsed photos, the tender bite marks on her shoulder, the indulgences of poetry and kisses.

“So tell me,” Sacha says. “What’s new?”


	3. the libertine of Harrogate: a play in two acts

 

**_1\. the hollow crown_ **

> There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.
> 
> —Shakespeare, _Henry V_

 

“The bucatini form of pasta is, I believe, scientifically superior to all other forms,” declares Caroline.

Sacha sits across from her—pleasingly slouched and tousled, mildly jetlagged, perhaps tipsy on at least two glasses of Sangiovese and perhaps more because she always keeps a steady hand on the wineglass while cooking and, if nothing else, Caroline thinks this must be a sign they are well-matched—and smiles indulgently. “Do go on.”

“It’s quite simple, a marvel of design. Really, whoever invented the bucatini noodle is a bloody genius because as far as inventions go—it’s right up there with the hula-hoop and the slinky. Also, you know, it’s similar to a deconstructed hula hoop or slinky, so that’s a common property to all three.” Caroline spears a long, limp strand of the Bucatini all’Amatriciana, oozing with tomato sauce and clogged with bits of pancetta—like my arteries, she thinks. “As far as pasta goes, the hollow tube here retains and holds the sauce better than any other tubular noodle! One could say the hollow tube is its hollow crown, as it were.”

“Caroline.” Sacha says her name with a sizable dollop of arch, amused exasperation in her voice, and disturbingly in the proximity of the same tone Caroline’s father used whenever he wanted to piss on her ideas and goals and thoughts and dreams, whenever she was acting what he deemed _ridiculous._

And this—a sign, perhaps, that they are not good together? “God, now I wish you did have a nickname for me,” she mutters.

Sacha hears her, but disbelieves: “What?”

“Never mind. What were you going to—”

“It’s cool,” Sacha says gently. “I told you. I’m fine with it.”

It’s a Sunday evening dinner at Sacha’s. They’ve already gotten through the confessional part of the evening, in which Caroline—facing Sacha in the living room, standing ramrod straight like a student awaiting expulsion—awkwardly explained that she had been intimate with a sheep farmer, although deliberately omitting the number of times and positions and orgasms and postcoital glasses of wines and bags of crisps—well, Gillian was the one usually chomping through crisps and devouring hunks of cheese and bits of apple and tendering pouty requests that Caroline make her a sandwich—and, per the terms of their agreement as initially set forth upon embarkation of their relationship, wished to continue seeing said sheep farmer—

“Oh. Wow,” Sacha had said from a rather comfortable lounging position on the sofa, as both eyebrows drifted upward toward her abundant curls and Caroline wondered if she had already partaken of several joints beforehand. Because God knows I would smoke a ton of weed before having to deal with me, she thought.

“So you _are_ shagging the Slapper,” Sacha murmured with genuine wonderment.

“ _Gillian,_ ” Caroline corrected, with a slight hitch of restrained furor in her tone.

“Right, right.” Sacha looked thoughtful for a long moment, smiled, and rose from the couch. “All right then.”

“All right? That’s it? Don’t we need some sort of certified lesbian relationship negotiator to intercede?”

“Well, I could invite over my mate Phoebe but she’s vegan and the bucatini has meat in it—”

“I’m joking,” Caroline interjects smoothly, then adds, nervously: “Are you joking?”

“—and didn’t you once say you were allergic to sandalwood? She wears an amulet filled with sandalwood incense and the blood of a UKIP protestor she slaughtered with a labrys.”

“Now you are really joking.”

“Yes, but Phoebe does have a degree in negotiation and conflict resolution from Berkeley. Now: Do you want to have dinner?”

If nothing else she had, at least, hoped to get a decent meal out of the whole evening. “Yes.”

Sacha kissed her. “Want to stay the night?”

Caroline’s ovaries answered on her behalf: “Yes.” Fortunately she had given Greg forewarning that dinner might turn into an overnight affair and that he would be solely in charge of Flora. As usual, any mention of romance made him as feverishly bright-eyed as a diabetic in a bakery, so he lit a clary sage candle before she left—“for sexy good luck!” Maybe it was working. But as Sacha sauntered into the kitchen to make dinner, Caroline hesitated. Was it bad form to sleep with one lover so soon after sleeping with another? Would Sacha be upset when she saw bruises on the inside of her thighs, the hickey on her breast? Would she even notice? Would she care? What were the rules? The etiquette? What did she feel? Can she truly strike a correct balance sexually and romantically and make everyone happy, even herself? And finally, what the fuck was for dinner?

“Do you want some wine?” Sacha called from the kitchen.

“Jesus fucking Christ, yes,” Caroline shouted, irritated as her shrillness mocked her by bouncing gleefully around the empty room.

Now dinner is over and they’ve exhausted the topic of New York—when Caroline was in New York, did she ever go to a Burmese restaurant on 7th Street near a Greek orthodox church where the waiters sometimes sang folks songs in Burmese to the customers? No, because she had been quite busy mourning her dead wife and sometimes considered flinging herself onto the subway tracks but for thoughts of a baby that needed her and that a pack of subway rats would probably gnaw on her corpse and that was almost as surprisingly powerful a motivator for staying alive as the child was—and now Caroline is nervously blathering to avoid the sexy inevitable.

So naturally she attempts to shift focus. “You looked a bit shocked when I told you.”

“To be honest, darling, I am bit surprised. When you first told me you’d had it off with her a while ago, I wondered, of course, if you might again—” Sacha drains her wineglass. “—but I didn’t think you’d actually go through with it.”

She tries to work up the nerve to be offended, but can’t: Caroline the coward, known by all.

Now Sacha gently volleys back in the form of projection: “You’re nervous.”

“It’s all new to me. And I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You won’t, I think, as long as you’re honest—well, that helps a lot.” Having stated the obvious, Sacha eyeballs the bottle of wine. “You said Gillian is okay with it.”

“Yeah.” Taking the visual cue, Caroline tops off Sacha’s glass, then adds: “She said she was.” Of course, she knows that Gillian is no different from many women, even herself, who indulge in the time-honored gendered defense of saying something is _fine and okay_ when it’s actually _shit and toss._ Gillian said she was okay with Jeremy Clarkson leaving _Top Gear_ but never watched the show after that, said she was okay with Robbie making stargazy pie last year for Christmas dinner but threw up twice later that night and spent Boxing Day in a bathrobe drinking ginger ale and dividing her time between recovery on the couch and playing a game with Calamity called “golfcake,” where they used Robbie’s golf clubs to bat around hacked-off clumps of old dried fruitcake into tea cups placed randomly on the floor. Points were lost if the fruit-balls were struck into the fireplace or hit photos on the mantelpiece; a frame containing a picture of Celia and her father sustained much damage, and of course Caroline suspected that Gillian had secret mad golfing skills and that this was quite intentional.

As did Celia. _Who is the adult and who is the child here?_ Her mother had cried upon spying the carnage of the incident, while Robbie had only glared balefully at a putter encrusted with fruit gunk.

Who is the libertine and who is the pursued here? Caroline now wonders to herself. She admires Sacha’s ease, her poise in this matter; she is an old hand at this, apparently, and primed to ask the important, if niggling, questions.

“Good.” Sacha nods approvingly. “And, ah, I don’t mean to overstep because it’s really your business, but—you’re okay with her seeing other people—?”

“Um. We haven’t really—talked—she has a lot on her plate right now.” But then, Gillian always had a lot on her plate. The subject of having other lovers, however, has not quite taken root in Caroline’s mind except in streamlined, frantic thoughts that wove around the mental landscape, not unlike the determined dashes of the Jeep Cherokee streaking across roads connecting work and home and the farmhouse and whatever posh playdate Flora finds herself at. While the Jeep sojourns always had an endpoint or destination, her thoughts, despite their apparent linearity, did not. Because their relationship consisted of tightly regulated tiny blocks of time, she greedily stockpiled the new intimacies between them rather than seeking definition of what it all meant, or where it would lead; and _this_ was because she has lived cheek and jowl with fatalism for a good three years now and fully expects everything to come crashing down at any moment.

So she is damned if she will be denied something as seemingly minor but miraculous in its beauty as Gillian reading: The concentration visible on her face, brows angled downward, absently biting at a thumbnail, rolling her neck when it’s been in the same position too long, ruffling pages when she’s getting restless or bored, glancing up to think and in those rich milliseconds that last infinitely within Caroline’s mind, the light from the bedroom window would scatter abundant fresh color in her irises. Then she would blink, remember Caroline was there, and lower her head with the quick, pained self-consciousness of a woman with a history comprised of random brutality and despite the perpetual, terror-stricken vigilance that she always thought would sustain a spell of protection around her. Through this woman, Caroline has learned that believing the same failed result time and time again is not stupidity, but an emotional nadir well beyond desperation and despair.

Thinking beyond the short term seems impossible; the embarrassment of riches at hand make everything more fraught with complication, and the fleeting pleasure all the more aching. She finds herself in fresh new skin, clawing at the itchy wounds of the past. Who knows when, if ever, they will heal.

“Well.” Sacha intrudes upon Caroline’s thoughts. She tilts a nearly empty wineglass. “Full plate or not, that is something you’ll need to discuss with her. This agreement won’t hold unless all parties honor the terms and respect the participants to the best of their abilities.” If for different reasons, Sacha also revels in the short term. But she also analyzes every angle and coolly speculates on the competition; it is the lawyer, the businesswoman in her.

“Yeah of course,” Caroline says quickly. “I’m just trying to find a way to bring it up without sounding like I’m—”

“—a lawyer?”

They both laugh awkwardly at that.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously.” Sacha sighs. “I know. I know how it comes across.”

Caroline catches the bitter undercurrent of the statement and eagerly, if fraudulently, assures otherwise: “I mean, it might be better if I approached as such. A bit more—detached, practical? I don’t know.”

“Follow your instincts.”

“The problem is I don’t have any.”

“Nonsense. Don’t be hard on yourself,” Sacha replies. “Pleasure drives us, and the sooner we all admit it to ourselves, and to governing the impulses that sabotage it, the happier we’ll all be.” She takes a linen napkin from her lap and tosses it onto the table. “Dessert?”

“I don’t know, I’m really stuffed. What is it?”

Sacha rises and walks away. In the fantastic, rhythmic flow of tits and ass in concordance with her confident strut, she is a glorious Sapphic pied piper. “Me.”

“Ah.” Caroline’s napkin falls to the floor as she jumps up and her knee painfully jars the table. “Think I can find room.”

After a hasty ascent upstairs, they pause for making out in the hallway, near an abstract expressionist painting that reminds Caroline of how chem lab looks after a full semester of scholarly triumphs and failures. But something about the painting’s radioactive rings around charred paint splotches prompts a bout of conscience.

She stops the kissing for a moment. “Look, I should tell you—I, I was with her the other day. Is that okay? Should we not?”

Sacha, who is splayed against the wall, pauses for a moment and rubs at her lower lip. “We should,” she replies cautiously.

“Okay.” Caroline grins.

“But perhaps that explains why you’ve bitten my lip like a mad badger consuming a grub—”

“Oh.”

“And slamming me against a wall—ah, that’s a _bit_ of a change in tempo.” Sacha smiles nervously.

“Ah. Oh, shit.” While there has never been explicit discussion between them of likes and dislikes in the bedroom, Caroline has always employed a modicum of restraint in certain matters. She correctly senses Sacha’s instinct for an aesthetic of cool control, for something carefully and elegantly planned that will yield the maximum amount of pleasure—always the right music and lighting, the right toys, the right foreplay and rituals. It’s a long way from the dangerous and impulsive, like getting felt up in a dirty Land Rover right outside a crowded pub and later driving home with panties drenched and nipples tingling.

“It’s all right,” Sacha assures. “Really.”

“It is?”

“Yeah, it’s—” Another quick smile. “I can adjust.”

“Well—I can adjust too,” Caroline says eagerly. “I don’t want to do anything you don’t like.”

“You won’t. I promise.” Sacha throws her arms around Caroline’s neck, and says, her normally indistinguishable Northern accent now exaggerated for mocking effect, “Reckon they do things different down on farm.”

For the moment, and to her later shame, Caroline puts aside ridicule for the sake of dessert _ **.**_

 

_**2\. infinite divisibility** _

> What are we made of but hunger and rage?
> 
> —Anne Carson
> 
>  

The choice of activity on Friday afternoon: a professional development meeting of philosophizing and navel-gazing with a pack of pale white bespectacled suits about burnout strategies or specialism or whatever career crisis they’ve deemed urgent at the moment, or personal development in the form of pursuing a record amount of orgasms in one week. As if it’s really a choice. Frankly, the latter goals are more challenging because the object of one’s affection has just finished a shift at a supermarket job, where mind-numbing obeisance to the toff classes—who believe in the God-given right to yell at people about the price of baby Swiss chard—has placed said object into a mood as jaundiced as the gratingly lurid yellow polo she wears.

But a smile and a bottle of red at least grant Caroline entry into the farmhouse.

She follows Gillian into the kitchen and deposits the wine bottle on the kitchen table. “We can just have a drink, if you want. I could make you something to eat?” she offers. “Have a chat?” The conversation with Sacha still weighs on her mind, so a prime motivator of this visit is codifying the terms of whatever the hell they were doing—wait, _codifying the terms_? Her brain sneers at this, well, insofar as a brain can actually sneer about anything. Oh fucking hell, she thinks, I really can’t act like a lawyer about this. “If you’re tired—”

Gillian gives her that sexily sullen, trailer trash _I will beat your ass down and you will like it_ look, casually undoes her ponytail and shakes out her hair, and Caroline knows it is game on. “Who said I was tired?”

“Well, I—” Before she can dig herself deeper into a foxhole of tactlessness by saying _you look it_ , the horrid yellow shirt hits her in the face like a giant malevolent egg yolk. As she bats it away Gillian grabs her hips, steers her toward the kitchen counter, and while they kiss with increasing intensity, she is half-lifted, half-pushed onto the counter.

Surprised that her ass does not messily converge with a pile of dirty dishes or a half-empty pot of tea, Caroline glances down at the immaculate surface and cannot resist taking the piss. “Oh, you cleaned it off, just for me!”

“Yeah.” Gillian’s fingers dance over the trail of blouse buttons, leaving them undone in her wake, so that the only boundary between Caroline’s tits and greedy farmer hands is but a thin, lacy bra. “Everything’s all about you.”

“Seems to be at the mo—” A hiss of shivery joy escapes her as the rough palms of Gillian’s hands shove up the bra and make contact with her nipples. Her hips twitch and leap and she teeters on the edge of the counter before wrapping her legs around Gillian’s waist for dear life. The heat of her cunt presses into the bare skin of Gillian’s torso, and Gillian releases a delighted moan at the contact. She arches and grinds and, desperate for more, pours everything she has into kissing because nothing else—whimpering, clutching, clawing, but damned if she’s going to beg—seems to be getting her properly rogered.

Finally Gillian’s hand slides up her thigh, cups her ass, and gathers a fistful of underwear. The fabric bundles and tightens dangerously as Gillian’s knuckles dig into her thigh and Caroline knows that her euphoric walk of shame when she arrives home in a couple hours will be sans panties.

She shifts, pulls back, gives Gillian a bit more room for the grand trick of ripping them off, which she likens to a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under a veritable feast; she is giddy with both anticipation and the teasing glee of ruining it a bit, because Gillian’s delight in destroying pricey lingerie is equal parts erotic fixation and class resentment. So she laughs and murmurs, breathless, into Gillian’s ear: “Joke’s on you. I wore old knickers today.”

Gillian licks and nips at her throat. “I’ll still enjoy it,” she whispers back, and the sensual riot of threat and promise contained in the rich burr of her voice is poetry itself and plays upon every sense, so much that after the rather ripping prelude, Caroline comes pretty quickly during the teasingly slow fuck, which usually has a longer, more satisfying finish.

“Jesus, I hardly did anything,” Gillian half-complains.

“That’s how good you are.” Indeed, she is about to demand that Gillian stay inside her for another go when she slides a bit on the edge of the counter and in the desperate attempt to stay put, one heel-clad foot slips and slams into a wooden cabinet door underneath the counter, leaving a noticeable crack that Gillian will gripe about for, approximately speaking, the next seven years.

Unceremoniously and disappointingly, Gillian pulls out, kneels over, and inspects the damage. “Aw, fuck, Caz.”

“Sorry.” Of course, not sorry. Particularly since this bent-over position affords a pleasing curvature of Gillian’s butt—clad in some weird stretchy work-mandated trouser, but magnificent all the same.

“I’m gonna have to _pay_ someone to fix this. Or make you bloody pay for it.”

“Well.” Caroline kicks off a heel, playfully brushes a stockinged foot along the swell of that fine arse. “How about you take it out in trade?”

After leaving a trail of clothing up to the bedroom, including torn panties, that would most likely puzzle and alarm each and every member of their extended family, they are naked on arrival in Gillian’s bedroom and here, Caroline hopes, her signals will not get crossed and her ardor will not manifest incorrectly, as it did with Sacha recently. Mutual getting-off occurred successfully that night, but she spent the better part of the afterglow worried that everything she did was quietly judged as massive romantic missteps.

With practiced gentleness, she tosses Gillian onto the bed; it’s something they’ve done before, a choreographed roughness as in pro wrestling matches, and Gillian’s reaction is as hoped—a laugh with a purring, “oh, hello” attached.

Thus encouraged, Caroline is on top and triumphant, kissing with ferociously focused passion, maddened with the compulsion to tantalizingly glide down that wonderful body and taste her, when Gillian hums into her mouth.

It’s not a safe word as such, the particular crescendo of this hum, but rather a definitive pause button. In the past, it has signaled a variance in appetite: Gillian wants a sandwich or a snack or a glass of wine, or wants to bring a vibrator or dildo into the action. Or—God help me, Caroline thinks desperately—she wants to talk about sheep. ( _Pete says the weirdo sheep shagger is back in the valley_ or _Angelina Jolie has been missing for days_ or _if I have to deal with one more arse tulip this week, I’m going to f-fucking lose it._ )

“What?” Caroline pulls back.

This time it’s an entirely different request, framed within Gillian’s usual awkward, apologetic hesitations. “Can—can we—slow down a bit?”

“Oh.” Too surprised to reveal disappointment, Caroline slides off her. “Of course.” She catches her breath and rapidly spirals into panic. “Did I do anything—?”

“No, no.” Gillian presses a reassuring hand against her belly. She yawns. “It’s good. Really good. Just need a mo to catch my breath and relax. Been on the go since before sunup.” She closes her eyes.

Before Caroline can fret maternally and ask if she’s eaten anything today, Gillian starts snoring softly.

Bloody hell. Caroline lies back and stares up at the now-familiar lightning jags of cracked paint across the ceiling. Then she glares at Gillian, who is slack-jawed and starting to drool—as if a mere foul look can discern whether they’re in for an long epic nap or a short power nap—and who also has the nerve to only snore when she’s on her back.

Caroline considers leaving. Then napping. It’s not like a nap would be an unwelcome development, but her blood runs in furious circuit through heart and head and body. Fuck. She covers her face with both hands. She knows this feeling all too well: The stranglehold of determination, the bloody-minded perfectionist pursuit that dogs nearly everything she does. It served her well at Oxford and as a head teacher, and even—John’s belief to the contrary—as head of household, but in matters personal the tendency runs to ruin. Ultimately it alienated her husband, drove her to pursue Kate on a timetable that suited neither one of them, and in this situation she is so driven to make two people happy she’s not quite certain how happy she is herself.

_This is supposed to be fun, you knobhead._

As usual when emotionally overwhelmed, she can only think to do something useful. She glances at a basket of clean, unfolded laundry sitting on a chair. Raff may have moved out months ago, but he still utilizes his mother as a laundry service. Not that she can blame Gillian for indulging him, because every time William is home from Oxford he is accompanied by an overstuffed duffel bag of malodorous clothes.

Or she could wash up the pile of dirty dishes in the sink downstairs. Or—she glances over the edge of the bed at the pile of books there—she could just read. The one on top of the pile is simply titled _Yorkshire Dales,_ a fat, battered paperback that Harry gave to Gillian. Since her bookshelf-making project became known among the family, Gillian’s home has become a dumping ground for everyone’s unwanted books. Two weeks ago she was reading a history of the Russian revolution that Gary had passed on; this peppered Gillian’s conversation with rather depressing facts such as, _did you know at least 7 million people died in the civil wars that followed the revolution?_ And _Did you know that Rasputin raped a nun?_ Unsurprisingly, Russian nun-raping and the like proved not terribly conducive to lovemaking and it took a couple glasses of wine, a back massage, and a bit of poetic filthy talk— _every second I spend between your thighs is heaven to me_ —to get things going again.

She grabs the Dales book, rolls over on her belly, and opens it, eyes skimming lazily over the preface:

_Though in places the landform of the Dales could be described as well-upholstered, in others the underlying geology grins through its surface with bared limestone teeth._

Even though this irritates profoundly as a too-accurate self-portrait—or, as the kids say these days, she feels called out—she keeps reading, becomes mildly absorbed in the text because there is a fair amount of plodding geological geekery going on, and so kills about twenty minutes, at which point Gillian’s snoring stops abruptly.

Now awake, Gillian blinks, stares at the ceiling, and rubs her face. All this before she can sheepishly acknowledge Caroline’s presence. “Shit. S-sorry about that.”

“It’s all right,” Caroline closes the book and gently rakes messy bangs away from Gillian’s forehead. “You must be pretty knackered lately.” The financial ramifications of the divorce were finally hitting Gillian and the farm. The absence of Robbie’s income meant more shifts at the market for her, and Raff’s availability as a helping hand—strained enough when he had moved out—had decreased even more so now that he was taking part-time classes at Leeds.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she adds. Her finger follows the disappearing road of a blue vein originating at the base of Gillian’s knobby wrist, gliding up the forearm, and going subterranean into the elbow dip. “We could just—talk.”

“Not why you’ve come here, is it?” Gillian—lounging, her other forearm tucked behind her head, her stare hard and hungry—is the inscrutable lover she’s never had. Kate was, despite restraint, clear enough: she wanted practical love as expressed in the domestic idyll of children and a shared home. Sacha wants the ease of pleasure, the reminders of youth. And Gillian, it seems, just wants to devour her whole.

“I—no, not just that. I wanted to see you.” It sounds peevish. “Didn’t just want a shag and a shower.”

Gillian rubs her face again, shakes off sleep the way a sheepdog flicks off rain. “You still mad about the shower gel? Celia will forget about it.”

“No,” Caroline sighs, “she won’t. She’s been sniffing at me like a hound all week.” That is another worry. When it comes to any number of seemingly trivial matters, her mother is like a dog with a bone. Unfortunately, Caroline’s romantic life has always been a favored, massive chewy bone of contention; just when she thinks the bone is buried, Celia digs it up and tears at it with newfound murderous relish.

“Well, bring your own soap. Not running a bloody spa hotel here.”

“Oh shit. Knew there was something I forgot.” By now her finger has traced over Gillian’s smooth bicep, shoulder, travels the carotid artery up to the cheek, and over to the intricate whorls of a sensitive ear, but she is now moody and distracted enough to change the subject, perhaps disastrously so.

“Gillian.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you—seeing anyone else right now?”

As expected, she gets that trademarked sneering scowl, but then Gillian snorts derisively. “Barely got time and energy enough to deal with you.”

“So that would be a no.”

“You want it in writing or something?”

Caroline waits a few beats before going further, before risking hearing something she didn’t want to hear. “Do you miss it?”

“Miss what?” Gillian squints sleepily.

“Being with other—people. You know. Men.”

She snorts again, shrugs. “Sure, I miss shagging someone for five minutes in a camper van or some bloke weighing 15 stone bouncing on top of me for two minutes before howling like a wildebeest and falling asleep on me before I even get off.”

Caroline winces. “That is _very_ specific imagery.”

“Sorry to offend your delicate dyke sensibilities, but my _almost_ -ex-husband has left a permanent dent in the bloody mattress and I’m none too pleased about it. I’m not kidding, had to bloody flip the bloody thing. If I’d money right now, I’d get new.” Gillian pauses. As of late, she has been less than charitable about Robbie, who still drags his feet on the matter of the divorce; he has the papers, but hasn’t signed them yet. Then she continues: “But no, it’s, no. It’s not, I mean, it’s not as different as you think. Different tools still get the job done.”

“Figures your metaphor of choice would be tools.” Caroline sighs. “Well, pursuing the metaphor—what if you find yourself bored with a wrench and wanting a screwdriver?”

Gillian rewards her with a particularly smoldering look. “I’ll tell the wrench to strap it on, settle back, and get ready for the ride of her life.”

“Um.” Caroline takes a moment to savor the mental images; alas, the strap-on is at her house in a locked bedroom drawer because she has nightmares about Flora discovering it and displaying it as a public sculpture in some richly imagined Lego world creation. “But what if you are tempted by a particularly tall, dark, and handsome screwdriver?”

She knows that Gillian still works, albeit not too directly, with Ollie at the store. It was not just beauty alone that kept Gillian enraptured, but also that he was _well trained,_ as she had pointedly told Caroline—and leaving no mystery as to who did the training. But now Gillian says that Ollie avoids her like the plague ever since that quite memorable evening when she got hit in the face with a beer can by a madwoman, and has moved on to shagging a couple teenaged bints in the bakery department.

Gillian’s mouth twists dangerously into a pained smile. “You think I can’t keep it in my pants.”

“No, it’s not that. I want to be fair, I want you to, ah, take it out of your pants if necessary, I mean, if you want to—”

All this discursive, metaphorical discussion of her nether region prompts Gillian to pull a blanket up above her waist.

The conversation is not progressing as hoped. Unfortunately, the single-minded course of her mind is like the M25 around London: a hellishly convoluted, crowded commitment with no end in sight. “It’s—we—well, you agreed to let me see someone else and I—I mean, if you’re seeing someone else too I would just like to know, I’m just asking a question—”

“Do I get to ask questions?”

While Caroline detects a note of simmering anger in Gillian’s tone, the sexy flaring of nostrils and the bare torso worthy of a pre-Raphaelite’s sketchbook predictably distracts, and she thinks it suitable to operate on the bitch setting as usual. “Do I smell sheep shit every time I come to visit you? Go on, then.”

“All right. _Pursuing the metaphor_ —”

Now she realizes it’s gone a step too far.

“—what if _you_ decide you want to exclusively use nothing but, oh, I dunno—” Gillian taps her chin in mocking thoughtfulness—“oh, let’s say, a fancy imported Italian wrench that has _a f-fucking degree from Cambridge?_ ”

Before Caroline can even think to respond, Gillian opts for the dramatic exit to punctuate her bitchy touché moment: flinging off blankets, feet thumping the floor as she pulls a t-shirt and pajama bottoms from the chaos of the laundry basket.

“I’m sorry. Wait, don’t go, don’t—” Caroline barely stops herself from completing the sentence with _put on clothes._ “—be mad.”

“Not mad,” Gillian mutters unconvincingly. While the t-shirt she puts on is a beautiful dark red the color of dried blood, the pajama bottoms she’s attempting to hop into—while cursing and tripping—are old, baggy, and green-striped, likely something Raff grew out of years ago. Hands on hips, she sways a bit, taking a moment to pull it together. “Just—want to get that bottle you brought.”

She stomps out of the room and down the stairs. Caroline claps a hand over her face, kicks herself for turning a simple confirmation on the state of affairs into a messy jealousy-driven interrogation. Because that much is plain to her now: she is jealous, she has no right to be, and she has no idea how to reconcile these two facts.

Minutes later, Gillian returns with the opened bottle of Sangiovese and two wine glasses. She pours out a glass and silently hands it to Caroline, then stares skeptically at the bottle.

“It’s Italian,” she says flatly.

At the crossroad of guilt and frustration, Caroline wants to scream. It is indeed the same wine that she had the other night while dining with Sacha, but she had bought it because she knew Gillian liked these kinds of versatile but well-balanced reds. “So what, now you’re going to stop drinking Italian wine?” she snaps. “Sort of cutting yourself off at the knees there, don’t you think?”

She can tell by the elaborate contortions of Gillian’s mouth that she is biting the inside of her cheek as a precautionary measure against serving up a soupcon of _fucks_ garnishing a lavish insult likely to be _snotty bitch_ or _overeducated Oxford twat_ or _toff cunt,_ and whilst buying a few seconds to come up with a more damning condemnation of the bottle in her hand:

“Looks expensive,” Gillian finally grumbles. As far as she is concerned, any wine over ten quid is immediately posh twat piss and part and parcel of the entire scam that is the wine industry; this innate disapproval, however, never prevents her from lustily partaking of any posh twat piss that Caroline pays for. Relenting, she sips, pauses, and gives it a curt nod of approval before sitting it on the nightstand. Then grabs the _Yorkshire Dales_ book, flops back into bed, and starts reading—or at least pretends to read while pointedly ignoring the naked woman in her bed who is so eager to make amends for shitty timing and botched sensitive conversations.

While contemplating her next move, Caroline gulps down the remainder of her glass. She drums her fingers on the bed. Gillian, face camouflaged by the pastoral pastels of the book cover, remains silent. She cups the interior of Gillian’s pajama’ed thigh. Her hand slides up, finds the discreet flap in the fabric meant to accommodate genitalia lacking in the present wearer but that is nonetheless beneficial to her purposes. Her fingers slip through the opening, wavering over a plume of soft pubic hair and the tender apex below it and she feels it, the tension radiating from Gillian’s thighs and the bullish exhalation of breath that follows the promise of her touch.

Gillian lowers the book.

And Caroline pushes the envelope. “Have you got to the part about the microclimate of the limestone pavement? It’s been affected by the alarming increases in the earth’s temperature since the Industrial Revolution—”

The book is flung to the floor, resulting in a permanent dog-eared bend to the cover and leading into a kinetic ballet that is not a physical fight—there is no hitting, no slapping— but a tangle of limbs as in a rugby scrim, part homoerotic camaraderie and display for dominance. Through sheer luck and positioning on the bed, she ends up having Gillian pressed against the headboard, her hands locked firmly onto Gillian’s hips.

But despite the apparent advantages of the position, she has never felt more vulnerable: She is naked; Gillian is not. And through no special genius or art, Gillian transforms fragility into an asset: Unlike Caroline, she operates unburdened by expectations or covert agenda. She follows the beat of her own blood. She cups Caroline’s neck with one hand, the heel of the other lodges against Caroline’s collarbone, her nose bashes into Caroline’s cheek, and Caroline is all too aware of the power at rest within those hands through the searing heat of her touch, of the deceptive strength within that slender body.

Gillian snarls with the shaky bravado of a cornered animal: “I don’t want anyone but you. All right? So stop f-fucking me about and acting—like, like you don’t really know anything, like you don’t know what I want. You know. _You’ve always known._ I want you.”

The admission exhausts her. Breathing heavily, she sags into Caroline. Everything unfolds slowly. Caroline kisses the top of her head and her cheek, holds her steady and secure until Gillian tentatively reciprocates, the tender and hesitant exchange of kisses a tightrope leading back to familiar ground. When finally Gillian sheds her clothes and they sink back down onto the bed, it’s a relief.

She lays between Gillian’s legs and, starting at one delicate bony ankle, kisses her way up: lips brushing the soft down of the hair on her legs, drifting past a bruise on the shin, the minor scars here and there, markers of pain along an intimate landscape, then the Khyber Pass of the knees, the generous stretch of the thighs, and in each moment she creates finer and finer divisions within the great expanse of intimacy between them—an infinite divisibility. The concept, now revealed in elegant proof before Caroline, riles both mind and body as all five senses lock in, powerfully engaged. She dives in, kisses and licks and sucks, the gentle leading into the rough and back, and the sacred into profane—she goes from ruminating about particle physics to thinking she could go down on this woman all fucking day. Gillian’s hands tangle rough and restless in her hair, alternately pulling and caressing, and when her thighs are trembling and slick, and her breath shallow as if she’s run a country mile, Caroline puts her over the top, sucking her slow and steady and determined until she lifts her hips and comes—possibly louder than Caroline’s ever heard before, her cries reverberate through the brutal quiet of the house and ripple through the farm, the trees, the valley.

She’d tell these things to Gillian save for the fact that she enjoys the silence ringing around them and the sweet caress of her hair, the way her body buoys on the tide of Gillian’s breathlessness. All of it carries her through into sleep, as does the confident belief that the day is tucked away into the secret care of the infinite, where it will blend and break and renew into unknown multitudes.


	4. the red card

> Our own perceptions are the world to us.
> 
> —Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

> We lost because we didn't win.
> 
> —Ronaldo

 

  1. **_concrete pastoral_**



Raff sits at the kitchen table in Robbie’s house, a shoebox of photographs before him: shiny old black and whites with those funny serrated edges, blurry colored photos from the 1960s, Polaroids from the 1970s and beyond. As they had finished dinner, he had made the mistake of mentioning that he possessed no photos of his father. This admission sent Robbie furiously clearing the table and disappearing into the living room for an unspecified amount of time as he dug through boxes of stuff he had moved out of the farmhouse months ago, all while shouting at his friend and roommate Mike, who had the telly cranked up as he watched rugby and who had been renting the house before Robbie moved back in. It was like _The Odd Couple_ except everything was a mess and it was not funny at all.

When Robbie returns triumphant, an old Nike shoebox in his hands, Raff keeps a sigh to himself. He had not been fishing for a trip down memory lane, merely stating facts. It’s not as if he’s never seen a photo of his dad before, but the only ones he has encountered are in a leather-bound photo album belonging to his grandfather. There are two he remembers: A blurry one of Eddie and Gillian at their outdoor wedding reception; hands intertwined as they cut a white cake, he scowling with concentration, she with windblown hair cascading over her face, expression unknown, both of them hunched awkwardly over the cake. The other one of Eddie alone—tense smile not reaching his eyes—holding his infant son.

Raff always thought it truly strange that his mother had absolutely no photos of his father. When he had asked about it a few years ago, she shrugged it off: They were poor, she had said. Every penny was poured into the farm, no money for frivolous things like cameras, no time for photoshoots— _how’s that any different from now?_ he had asked sarcastically, which earned him one of her quietly furious looks, the one that always signaled the end of a discussion and that if he chose to disregard this warning, shouting ornamented with the décolletage of _shit_ and _fuck_ would soon follow.

The next time he judiciously—albeit cruelly—risked the subject again during one of her dark spells last winter. Robbie had stormed off to work after yet another argument and she had spent the better part of the evening drinking, staring into the fireplace, and sort-of watching _The Maltese Falcon_ on telly. She was tired and tipsy, with defenses down, but this time his inquiry yielded a confession that possessed the ring of truth. She admitted she had destroyed all the photos she had of Eddie—and some personal keepsakes—after he died. She had been depressed and overwhelmed, she claimed, and not thinking clearly.

He could not really blame her for that.

Now Robbie flips off the lid of the shoebox and tosses a stack of Polaroids at him. It is a series with a common theme: Eddie Greenwood posed in front of cars or motorbikes with either his stocky brother or a pretty girl beside him. The disturbing commonality, however, of each photo is Eddie’s fixed, blank-eyed stare, his mouth an intractable flatline.

“He never smiles,” Raff says.

Robbie scratches a bearded, sandpapery cheek. “He were self-conscious. Crooked teeth. I always told him they weren’t bad, but he wouldn’t listen. And he couldn’t ever afford to get ’em fixed.”

“Didn’t keep the girls away, I see.”

“Aye.” Robbie sighs enviously. “They never could resist him.” As Raff idly flips through the series of Polaroids Robbie hovers over him, and comments on the identity of each one: “That’s Crystal with the Corsair, she were an exchange student from the States. Wisconsin, I think. And there’s Rita, her cousin is Ian, the bloke who runs your mum’s favorite shite pub. Oh, and that one’s Maxine, legs for days as you can see—”

Raff tunes out, taking in only the rhythm of the nostalgic commentary as the Polaroids swim in front of him and he marvels at how the colors appear faded and saturated at once; the border between past and present so attenuated he envies them—Robbie, his father, his mother—for living through that differently shaded world.

Without looking he flips to another photo and when Robbie fails to launch into another narrative, he prompts automatically: “Well, who’s this one?”

Playfully Robbie cuffs him on the head. “Don’t be cheeky.”

He looks again and feels foolish for not seeing it; if anything, the eyes alone give it all away. It is his mother standing next to his father, both leaning against what looks like a vintage Mustang—Raff doesn’t know for sure and doesn’t really care, because he did not inherit this great genetic love of cars and fixing them from either parent. Her hair is longer and darker than he’s ever seen before, her face deeply dimpled with chubby baby cheeks that frame the hesitant smile he knows so well. She wears a plaid school skirt and a black Ramones t-shirt, and a studded black leather bracelet on her wrist. As if cold, she hugs herself awkwardly while leaning shyly into Eddie. He slouches against the vehicle, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans with the same dull, sluggish expression on his face that Raff has seen in every photo of him thus far, inscrutable and indelible and bound to forever remain so to his son. Once Raff heard someone, can’t remember who, say that photos of the dead are offerings from the great beyond, clues and signposts to a life lived; if so, Eddie Greenwood’s face is but a mausoleum secreting away an abundance of thoughts and feelings, the sensual, cruel crookedness of his lips offer nothing but permanent denial. Somewhere between the idealized brother and the unspeakable husband is the man he will never know.

A yearning he has been conscious of for so many years—to know and grasp the totality of who his father was and what he was like—snaps like a severed rope. It’s strangely liberating. He looks up from the photo to stare out the tiny window square of the kitchen backdoor, at the oblique lodestone of night framed there.

Robbie coughs nervously. “You can have that one if you like.”

“No.” Raff worries he’s said it too quickly, then adds: “Don’t want to take your only copy. It’s all right. Just wanted to have a look.”

Swiftly Robbie shovels the photos back into the box. “If you change your mind.” He disappears into the living room again.

Their monthly dinner ends as usual: standing outside in the square of concrete behind the house that passes for a backyard, where there’s nothing to see but other tiny houses under the sky. As far as Raff can tell, the entire street contains nothing but men divorced or divorcing, estranged from wives and partners and children, moving boxes in and out of houses. Box-like houses filled with boxes. There is a gas grill in Robbie’s yard, and a few dead potted plants—one of Cheryl’s attempts at feminizing the brutalist bachelor pad. It’s quite a comedown from living in the country, in a farmhouse. Can’t even see the stars here. Not that he has ever been big on stargazing, despite his mother’s attempts to get him interested, but being closer to the sky means something, even if he cannot hope to articulate what it is.

So he stands politely in this bleak concrete pastoral while Robbie smokes furiously and tries to enlist him as an ally in the ongoing but futile effort to patch up his marriage, which includes interrogating Raff about Gillian’s apparently nefarious activities. Raff wonders if their marriage might have had more of a chance if Robbie could have, for more than a fleeting second, thought of her as innocent until proven guilty and not the other bloody way around. This is, after all, the same man who first brought to Raff’s attention that his mother had all the ear-markings of a murder suspect and slept around more than Robbie—and, apparently, the entirety of the Calder Valley—thought that she should. Before that he had never been aware that she had a reputation as such until the consequences of her impulsive mucking about with Paul—who, after all these years, was still a dickhead with a punchable face—brought about numerous fistfights, accusations of past indiscretions, and a burnt-out Landy.

Robbie exhales smoke into the chilly blue evening. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If she were seeing someone.”

Raff snorts softly. “As if I’d really know.” That much is true. She wouldn’t tell and he doesn’t know for certain. What he will not share with Robbie is the suspicion he has, that she is actually involved with someone. Last weekend during his usual farmhouse visit on Sunday, he intended to pick up the laundry she had done for him and that, she cheerfully admitted as she sauntered out to the barn to work, was still not folded. He tracked the basket of clean clothes to one of its usual locations, the chair in her bedroom—and where he could not help but notice two empty wineglasses among the Jenga pile of books by the bed.

The books were another development that temporarily gave him cause for concern, if but for the sole reason that he worried she was once again involved with the Keats-quoting but otherwise useless tosser John Elliot. But she was building a bookshelf for the books she had kept in the barn for years, had even shyly asked Raff to help her with it, and that seemed a positive thing. He could not say that she was happy, or even content—she had her moments, certainly, but those descriptors never accurately described the vast terrain of her emotional landscape. With understated delicacy, a heretofore-unknown aspect of serenity had settled over her—like a soldier home from war, caught in a celebratory wave of confetti or flower petals, not quite accustomed to peacetime but quietly arching body and soul toward the promise of it. Maybe granddad is right, he thinks. Maybe she is best left on her own.

Apparently he is not the only one worried about John: “So you’ve not seen anyone there?” Robbie persists. “Like that piece of shite John—”

This time, Raff is happy to share a pertinent nugget of information that greatly put his own mind at ease: “No worries there. Other week at tea, Celia told me he’s been in rehab for a few weeks now. Someplace in Cornwall. So it’s like I told you last time: No one is out at farm busting down her door, eh? Just family. Me, Ellie, Calam, Granddad, Celia, Caroline.”

“Caroline would know it, if something’s going on,” Robbie mutters.

Raff guffaws. “Wouldn’t recommend you interrogating her.” He knows Robbie fancies himself as some sort of unsung, diamond-in-the-rough detective, but a battle of wits and wills with Caroline would no doubt find him face down on the floor, losing in grand, Inspector Closeau-type style.

Robbie ignores this and paces the concrete length of the yard like a convict. “She’s seeing someone, I know it.” He jabs a finger at Raff. “Weeks ago, we were meeting with lawyers—you know what? She shows up in a dress. A dress. It weren’t for _my_ benefit, I know damn well of that. You know how she is. Anytime we went out and I tried to get her to wear one—it were a bloody ordeal, you know? She would act like I was trying to stab her or summat.”

“You should just be glad she wore dress to her own bloody wedding.”

“ _And_ not only was she wearing dress, she had a mark on her neck.” He points at the base of his throat. “Here.”

“Oh Jesus.” Discreetly, Raff unpockets his mobile to find out what time it is. Jez should be rolling by to pick him up soon and it’s a good thing too, because this burgeoning discussion of his mother’s sex life is a most excellent motivator for getting supremely high tonight.

“A hickey,” Robbie clarifies unnecessarily. “Sorry but seriously, there’s got to be somebody.”

Exasperated, Raff loses patience. “And if there is—if she is seeing someone, what are you going to do about it? Eh? Might as well face it, you’re getting divorced. It’s—you’ve got papers. It’s one and done.”

Irritably, Robbie grinds out a cigarette butt on the concrete patio with his shoe. “Did she tell you to nag me about signing?”

“She’s said nowt about it to me.” Worried he is being too cruel, Raff pauses, gentles his tone. “Look, you gave it your best shot.”

“Yeah, but _she_ didn’t give it _her_ best shot,” Robbie snaps.

“It don’t matter. Like I said, one and done. Weren’t meant to be. Got to move on.”

“Yeah.” He shakes his head. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

Raff’s pinging mobile announces Jez’s arrival. He makes his farewells knowing the next time he’s over, the conversation will repeat itself with _Groundhog Day_ -like precision.

 

  1. **_fuck, mate_**



His life is chockablock with adult rituals: Monthly dinners with Robbie. Bimonthly lunches with Gary. Fridays working at the farm. Sundays meant tea with the grandparents or at the farm with the entire family, or sometimes just with his mum and Calamity. On a less formalized basis are the fights with Ellie’s mother, a stroppy child who is mystery to him, an overworked girlfriend who now loathes his touch, the drudgery of farm work, the tantalizing uselessness of university classes—he enjoys them, but cannot see how they will practically apply to his life—and a best mate up to his eyeballs in homemade meth.

Ever since they became friends in primary school, Raff has alternately envied and pitied Jeremy, known to one and all as Jez: So profoundly unconcerned is the lad about the future, the past, or anyone or anything in between that Raff admires his emotionally unencumbered existence until once again reminded of the consequences of Being Jez: two children by two different women and with another on the way, and no career prospects aside from dealing weed and participating in ill-advised manufacture of meth occurring in his mother’s house, the brainchild of an older and even more dissolute brother. Lately Jez had been at Raff to help him in the biz—if not in the selling part, then the making, largely because Raff had mentioned in passing that his step-aunt possessed a chemistry degree from Oxford.

A month ago over Sunday tea with the family, he had clumsily attempted to casually pick Caroline’s brain about what it would take to make the drug. Jez made it all sound like a lark, but he needed an informed opinion on the matter.

Rather than answering any questions— _so, Cazza, um, how dangerous is_ _pseudoephedrine?_ —Caroline only glanced at him coolly over the rim of her teacup and murmured in an undertone most arch, “You’re not _really_ asking me how to make meth, are you, Raphael?”

While he appreciated Caroline’s attempt at discretion, the word _meth_ was nonetheless a dog whistle for his mother’s supersonic hearing and cut through the cacophony of conversation at the busy table.

“You f-fucking idiot,” Gillian had screamed. “What do you think you’re playing at, eh? I swear, I am going to m-murder that bloody pillock Jez if he gets you mixed up in his shit. This is not _Breaking Fucking Bad_ and you’re not going to win an Emmy and go to Hollywood—”

“That he thought to ask, though. I’m kind of flattered, actually—” Caroline said.

“Caz!” Whenever Caroline displayed these rare signs of moral dubiousness, she never got away with it; his mother relished these instances with judgmental fervor and in this instance referred to Caroline as “Oxford Meth Queen” all afternoon long.

That said, Raff had never seriously considered the alliance. Jez’s moneymaking schemes were always dubious at best. When they were twelve, they had embarked on selling orangeade and lemonade at a local market one summer. It all went swimmingly and they made money hand over fist until it was revealed that Jez was mixing vodka in the lemonade and gin in the orangeade.  

While it was easy enough to extricate himself from the general chaos of Jez’s life, being in the moment with him is an entirely different matter. After Jez picks him up at Robbie’s, they are at a pub for hours until they’re booted out, then they drive up to Ladstone Rock where they sit in Jez’s chilly pickup and smoke a joint. Jez prevails upon him to try a hash brownie. He does—and he’s pretty much done for the night as he attains frightening new levels of altered consciousness. Ellie calls. He forgot to buy bogroll today. They argue. She tells him to fuck off and not come home. Furious, he flings the mobile out into the great wooded darkness. He and Jez spend nearly half an hour looking for the phone in the bright glare of truck’s headlamps until Jez gets the bright idea to call Raff’s number on his mobile. It works. Once the mobile is found, Raff drinks a lager and throws up. He texts Ellie. She’s still furious and insists he not show his face at Harry’s. Jez calls Ellie to beg on his behalf and all Raff can hear from twenty-odd feet away as he lays on the ground staring up at the stars is the tinny furor of her voice, which, of course, makes him think of his mother. He always thought Ellie wouldn’t be like his mother but here she is, shouting on the phone in an inimitably Gillian Greenwood fashion.

Then they’re back in the pickup and he thinks Jez shouldn’t be driving but they are rolling down the dark road and he thinks the car is spinning, or going backwards, or falling apart, or maybe all of it, so he huddles against the passenger door, clinging to the armrest for dear life as he hisses, “Where’re we going?”

“Takin’ you to your mum’s, mate.”

“Fuck, Jez,” he moans. “Don’t do that. She’ll murder us both.”

“Nah. I keep telling you, mate, your mum, she loves me. ’Sides, I already called her, said we were on way.”

For some strange reason Jez seems convinced that Gillian not only finds him fascinating and brilliant, but also harbors some great forbidden and unrequited passion for him. To Raff, she acts as she normally does with most men: with befuddled, wary contempt.

“Does my mother really like men?” _Oh, I said that aloud._

Jez snorts. “Do you really want to go there, mate? I mean, no offense, I’ve got mad respect for your mum. She’s a real player. She just gets called a slag ’cause people are jealous, you know?”

“If you don’t stop, I’m going to throw up again.”

“You’re _so sensitive._ ”

“Seriously, Jez. Don’t take me to farm. She’s mad as hell with you. I mean, she knows, mate. About the—you know.”

Dangerously, Jez takes his eyes off the road and stares at Raff with slack-jawed outrage. “About the—”

“Yeah.”

“You winding me up?”

Raff moans.

Jez says, “Fuck, mate.”

The great thing about Jez is that he never gets really angry. His displeasure at life and its injustices, his amazement at the complexities of the social order, his frustration that the world has never fully acknowledged his amazing and righteous DJ skills, is usually extrapolated in two simple words: _fuck, mate._ As in: _Fuck, mate, I got Tania up the duff again. Fuck, mate, Tania won’t get rid of it. Fuck, mate, they’ve stopped making that hair pomade I like, the one that made my hair shiny but not greasy._

“Fuck, mate,” Jez repeats. “Why’d you tell her that?”

“I didn’t fucking tell her.” Raff’s fingernails dig deeper into the armrest because he swears the truck seems to be spinning counterclockwise.

“Then who—”

“Christ’s sake, Jez, your _mum_ told her!”

The vibrations of the universe smooth themselves out and the truck once again seems to be proceeding in a linear motion.

“Fuck, mate.” Jez shakes his head. “My mum’s a cunt sometimes.”

Finally they arrive at the farmhouse and Raff is afraid to look, but at the sound of tires on gravel the outdoor light goes on and there she is: his mother, standing in the doorway, arms folded, and despite the Halifaxian couture of ratty loungewear probably older than he is, the open doorway frames a malevolent backlighting that renders her more frightening than Prince Prospero welcoming guests to his castle in _Masque of the Red Death_.

He has an arm slung around Jez’s shoulders and is half-dragged, half-guided into the house.

“Gillian, my love,” Jez booms in his most seductive baritone.

In turn, she replies with deadpan menace. “Jez, you fucking shit-for-brains.”

“You sweet-talk me like no other woman.”

“You fucking wankpot, tosser, dickhead. What did you give him?”

“Just one too many, is all. Our Raff has a delicate constitution.”

“Help me get him upstairs.”

But once inside Raff breaks free of any attempt to help him navigate the path to his old bedroom; swatting away the multitude of helpful hands, he ends up half-crawling, half-staggering up the stairs as they bear reluctant witness, and while Gillian continues berating Jez with vigorous and colorful threats: “If you’ve given my son meth, I will cut off your balls and use them for cricket practice and I don’t even _like_ cricket, and then I will beat you over the head _with_ the bat until you are nothing but a bloody ball-less blot on the ground.”

“Don’t fuck with her, mate,” Raff groans as he climbs Dusty Stair Mountain. “You’ll not win.”

“Learning to crawl, eh, mate?” Jez calls after him.

“ _Learning to Crawl_ ,” Gillian is saying, apropos of nothing, “might be the best Pretenders album.” Because he wouldn’t be in his mother’s house without her throwing out some dated reference to old music or films, and he knows she does this to provide herself with some odd sense of comfort and Christ knows she needs it, dealing with her sorry-ass son—

“Who’re the Pretenders?” Jez innocently inquires.

“Shit, Jez. That’s the last fucking straw.”

  1. **_the whole of the moon_**



As morning edges toward afternoon, Raff awakens to the castanet of a paracetamol bottle right above his head, an accompaniment to his mother’s toneless singsong: “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey.”

Head pounding, mouth dry, he jumps.

Gillian cackles. She sits the bottle of pills next to a glass of water on the nightstand and silently apologizes for the rough wake-up call by gently brushing sweaty, sticky hair away from his forehead.

“How we doin’, lad?”

He groans.

Idly she kicks at the bucket that was apparently placed beside the bed the night before and he nearly leaps off the bed at the loud scraping noise it makes. “Didn’t upchuck at all?”

“Did you the favor of puking before I got here last night,” he manages hoarsely.

“Aw, bless. You are really everything a mother could hope for.” Gillian’s mouth twitches reluctantly before settling into an affectionate grin. “You hungry? Got eggs, bacon, coffee at the ready.”

Another groan.

“Well, come down when you want.” She turns to leave, but pauses in the doorway. “Oh, and when you do—Caz is here, so put on actual clothes, yeah?” Critically she nods at him, knowing full well he would think nothing of sauntering downstairs to eat in what he currently wears, which is nothing but plaid boxers.

“Caroline’s here?” he croaks incredulously.

“Yeah. Planned on having lunch today anyway, wasn’t going to change my plans because you’re a twat. She actually cooked, so you’re in for at least one good meal today.” Then she’s gone.

He groans again, stares at the ceiling. As much as he likes Caroline, this means he will have to act polite and civil and perhaps even make conversation. On the other hand, her presence might keep his mother from completely tearing him a new arsehole at the moment. And at least it’s Caroline and not whatever book-reading new bloke his mum is shagging—shit, does that mean someone was here last night and he didn’t know about it? Not that she has ever been in the habit of having men over for tea or breakfast or whatever, let alone anyone staying the night. But then you’re not here anymore, he thinks while pulling on the pair of clean jeans and tee that Gillian had left draped over a chair for him. For several minutes he sits on the bed, properly stewing in regret, and he’s tired and hungover enough to allow faintly disturbing thoughts into the mix: _You don’t know your father and you don’t know your mother and it’s hard to say whose bloody fault it is, if it’s anyone’s, but maybe it is yours after all._

Raff creeps downstairs, wondering if he will catch any surreptitious snippets of conversation about last night; it might be helpful to gauge a mood before entering the lionesses’ den.

Instead it’s nothing but Gillian lamenting the end of the line for Land Rover Defenders. “Going to have to keep what I’ve got running until the end of my days.”

“You could get a Jeep,” Caroline suggests.

“Bite your tongue.”

Caroline hums as if pondering a retort and turns away from the stove in time to see him sway into the kitchen, at which point she booms in her loudest headmistress voice, “Good afternoon, Raphael!”

His head nearly falls off his neck. Gillian laughs.

“I’m sorry,” Somehow Caroline manages to sound contrite even while giggling herself. “Your mother made me do that.”

“Nobody makes you do anything,” Gillian scoffs.

Raff moans and sits. Almost magically, a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast appears in front of him.

As he had hoped, while they eat Caroline diplomatically steers the conversation away from events of the night before and instead politely peppers him with questions about Calamity’s school and how she’s doing there. Unfortunately this is a subject about which he can bullshit very little, as demonstrated by his mother’s eyeroll of disapproval.

So he changes the subject with ham-fisted sadism. “So how long was Jez here last night?”

Caroline stops chewing for a moment as Gillian gives him that dead-eyed, conversation-murdering look. “Best mind what you say next, lad.”

Now Raff gives _her_ the eyeroll.

“I’m not the one who was out half the night with that dickhead,” Gillian shoots back, “pissing about and doing God knows what—”

“Oh, like you’re always at home like a bloody nun in an oyster—”

“Cloister,” Caroline corrects, “which I wouldn’t mind being in myself if you two keep this up.”

“—seriously,” Gillian goes on, “what were you thinking? He was about as high as you were, and _he was driving_! Had to get an entire pot of tea in him before he was sober enough to get behind the bloody wheel again.”

Raff ignores all this. “Well. It’s just hard to know what all you do out here on your own.”

Gillian takes a deep breath and to his infinite surprise—although again, he chalks it up to Caroline’s presence—simply defuses the situation with terse statement of fact. “Yeah, I know you have a very vivid imagination, but what I do out here is my own f-f-bloody business and I’m not hurting anyone. You, on the other hand, driving around with that stoned pillock—”

She doesn’t have to take the point further. He slumps in the chair, too tired to argue anyway.

An awkward silence ensues until Caroline wipes her mouth with a napkin and scrutinizes him quietly. He expects some kind of reassuring word, gentle chastisement, or resumption of chitchat. “So. Raff.”

“Yeah?”

“You do look like shit this morning,” Caroline says.

It does the trick of breaking the tension; they all burst into laughter.

Raff takes a deep breath and rubs his face. “God. I am knackered.”

“Then go on back to bed,” Gillian says. “Get some kip for a while, then take a shower. You’ll be right as rain in a few.”

Caroline leans back, sips at her coffee “She’s right. Your mum is a world-renowned expert on hangovers, you know.”

After a week of feeling as if he disappoints everyone—Robbie because he will not willingly play spy in the farmhouse of love, Jez because he doesn’t want to join the meth empire, his tutor at Leeds who keeps needling him about _what you want to do with your life,_ and Ellie because of, well, everything—he hesitates to accept unwarranted kindness from the person who, he thinks, may need him the most. “You sure?”

“Yeah. You’re not much good to me in your current state anyway. Go on. We’ll clear up down here.”

“‘We?’” Caroline retorts. “I cooked, you twat.”

He leaves them to their usual bickering and goes back to bed.  

He’s not sure how long he has been sleeping when the bang of the screen door does not wake him so much as remind him where he is: home, setting a soothing, restorative stage for a semi-conscious dreamscape of hills and stone, moss and weed, all of it stirred by the wind. He hears a woman’s laugh. Slowly he sits up, rubs his head, and gulps down all the water from the glass on the table. The nausea and headache have, at last, subsided.

Standing at the bedroom window, he sees his mother walking behind Caroline as they move toward the Jeep Cherokee in the driveway; she swaggers in a kind of mock-defeatist, _aw shucks you have to go_ gait. He rarely sees her this playful, except when she’s with Calamity and he is fascinated, and then embarrassed, to witness something he isn’t supposed to see, however innocuous it may be. Caroline turns and smiles, pushes windblown hair out of her face, and leans against the Jeep. As they talk, his mother takes several steps closer to Caroline, a perplexing infringement of personal space that, if they were in a footy match, might merit a yellow card. But women’s friendships are intense, weird things, the understanding of which ranges far outside his wheelhouse. He’s seen it in Ellie’s interactions with her girlfriends and here, in this odd friendship between his mother and Caroline. Raff never imagined they would truly become friends but, like everyone else around them at the time, he had been inordinately relieved when they started getting on properly because the force and strain of their initial enmity would have all but wrecked the relationship between his granddad and Celia.

Admittedly weirder things have happened in heaven and earth, but the weirdest fucking thing of all happens right now outside his window: His mother throws her arms around Caroline’s neck and kisses her in such a passionately long, Hollywood-movie kind of lingering fashion that there is no doubt copious amounts of tongue are involved and that makes him terribly grateful he has balcony seating for this completely unexpected performance. And while he may be a utter knobhead when it comes to the bewildering myriad complexities of women and their intricate relationships, he is fairly fucking certain this is not how you kiss your platonic lady friends or even your slightly antagonistic stepsister for that matter.

Red card.

He turns away quickly, gropes blindly for the support of the bed as he sits. What the sweet fuck was in that hash brownie or biscuit or whatever the fuck it was that Jez gave him last night? _I have entered some kind of lesbian Matrix._ No. A weird waking dream? Although why he would be dreaming _that_ makes him think Ellie is right and he does need therapy. Vigorously he shakes his head, slaps his cheeks a few times, and looks out the window again.

They are still kissing. Even worse, Caroline’s hand now cups his mother’s arse.

He sits down again. _Okay. No more looking outside window._ Even when he hears the sound of the Jeep driving away, he doesn’t risk it.

Will showering provide some sort of clarity, wake him from this foray into bizarro world? No, it only gives him more time to wonder how long it’s been going on. The relaxed, intimate ease of that kiss indicated that it was nothing new for them. Were they having it off while she was married to Robbie? Even before then? Surely not while Caroline was with Kate. But supposedly Caroline is still seeing that other woman, the one whom his mother once referred to as Horse Face Money Big Tits—and there’s another yellow card, that gloomy jealousy of hers about the girlfriend. He realizes there is a whole backlog of yellow cards he’s witnessed and not quite made sense of: the quick, surreptitious bits of affections between them, as if they both feared that hands brushing together or arm squeezes could be seriously called into question, his mother’s extreme and alternating moods around Caroline from bouts of jittery, almost euphoric nervousness to sullen rudeness. Not to mention the occasional look not easily decoded—the most memorable one witnessed by him during granddad’s wedding to Celia. Briefly he had noticed his mother watching Caroline with Kate as they danced and kissed, and the look on Gillian’s face troubled him. It was not revulsion, as he initially thought, but resembled something akin to jealousy. At the time he attributed her reaction to a wide-ranging envy of the bounty that was Caroline’s life: a good, stable job that she loved, financial security, a comfortable home, and a happy reunion with someone she really loved. Now the truth seems less straightforward.

Once dressed, he’s ready not for work but confrontation, even though his head still throbs from both the night before and what he witnessed about an hour ago. Outside he finds her near the barn, squatting in front of a large bolt of wire fencing, squinting critically as she examines it.

She hears him coming, and doesn’t bother to look up. “Was thinking,” she says, “if you’re feeling up for it, we could repair the fence out at the north end.” When he says nothing, she glances up, worried. “You still sick?”

Raff blurts it out. “I don’t believe you.”

Slowly, Gillian unfurls from the squat, brushes her hands on her jeans. “You don’t believe what?”

“What’s going on? With you and Caroline, I mean.”

“What?”

“I saw you. From my window. Kissing her.”

She says nothing but, caught out, her face softens, as if she welcomes the inevitability of verbal blows to come. Perhaps, in a way, she is relieved. It gives him a moment’s pause before he comes out swinging.

“Don’t tell me it’s none of my business. Because it’s—it is, she’s family.” He shakes his head. “You never change, do ya? Should’ve known when you married Robbie—nothing would change _you,_ anyway. I knew you didn’t really love him, I’ve always known that, I just thought it would be good for you, settle you. But it didn’t—all right then, fine. You do you. But seriously—why Caroline? After all she’s been through. She’s not the type you casually muck around with. She’s not like that, and you know it. And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Just messing about as usual.”

He expects a barrage of defensiveness and anger marked with the usual swearing, or the stony sullenness of her damning silences. Instead an unspecified emotion glints off her face—an acknowledgment of pain—as she turns away from him and walks back to the house.

Raff may not have actual photos of his father, but within his own mind there are images rendered as amalgamations of reality and fantasy, from stories told and things seen and unseen. He remembers a large man with a tan-colored workcoat, the broad, hulking, defeated swing of his back as he walks. The smoky phantom imprimatur of that memory rides Gillian’s back as she navigates the path back to the house. Helplessly he stands outside for a while, looking at the familiar skyline, not knowing what to do next, just knowing he should do something—and, if he can help it, maybe not make it worse.

In the house he finds her sitting on the couch in the living room, cup of tea on the table in front of her, slouched far down and staring up at the ceiling.

Despite the pose of surrender, Gillian hoarsely musters some growly, righteous anger: “If you’re coming in to have a go at me, you can just f-fuck right off and go back out the door. I won’t have it in my own house.”

 _Christ._ Raff leans heavily against the fireplace. “I’m _not_ having a go at you, I don’t want to have a go at you—I just—I mean, this isn’t—” He stops himself from saying _normal_ , knows that is not the right word here. The headache returns and he rubs at his head. “I’m trying to make sense of it, all right? Maybe you can forgive me for being a little surprised. I mean, what—I don’t even know where to begin. Are you going to tell me you’re gay? You’ve doing the late-in-life lesbian thing too? Is it a trend? Should I be reading all those lady mags that Ellie has?”

“I’m not—” Gillian begins. A sigh relaxes her. “I like both. I—I always have.” Raff is familiar with expression that now crosses her face: the _oh, right_ look she gets when something terribly obvious clicks in her head. It is as if she has never really said this aloud before to anyone, let alone truly admitted it to herself. Then she gets defensive again: “It’s not completely unheard of, you know.”

“You could have said something.”

“Oh really?” She laughs, hollow and bitter. “What was I supposed to do? Announce it to everyone at Sunday tea? Tell you some morning over breakfast? ‘Here’s your porridge, I’ve packed your lunch, and oh, by the way, I like to sleep with women.’ So now you know. Happy? Does it confirm what everyone’s told you all along: I’m a slapper, a whore, I’ll sleep with anyone? That’s what you all want to believe, innit it?”

“I don’t care about that. I don’t care who you—” He frowns. “You didn’t think I would, did ya?”

She hunches over the table, hands in tense entanglement with one another, seeking solace by staring at the cup of tea. “No.” The reply comes on a trail of ragged breath. “I didn’t think that.”

Gillian teeters on the precipice of grand emotion, of confession far greater than what she has just admitted because she can no longer stand the forces within her. She can accommodate Caroline’s whims and preferences to an extent; she will withstand the insults and assaults and scrutiny of everyone from Robbie to a nameless woman with a beer can; she will do eternal penance for the fate of Eddie Greenwood. But love is something not easily parsed away and entombed in a secret chamber within her mind.

It all seems clear enough to Raff now, so much so that he cannot help but push her over the edge, into the glorious necessity of emotional free-fall. Because she requires the clarity and the release that it will bring about more than he does. “But Caroline,” he says, and if _beseeching_ floats into his mind, that great old-timey word, it’s because it fits so bloody well. “Of all the women—?”

He barely hears the whisper of confirmation: “Of all the bloody women.” She looks away, but from the rough hitch of her voice, and the swiping gesture she makes at her face, he knows she is crying.

Now all Raff can think to say is _fuck, mate._ The thought of Jez, though, brings the entire exhausting whirligig of the past twenty-four hours to a full-circle looping crash in his head, and so he flops on the couch beside his mother, the woman in love with her stepsister and who, for once in her life, appears to be shooting for the whole of the moon.

And frankly he doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. “Jesus,” he sighs, still disbelieving. “You are dead serious.”

She manages a nod.

Casually he makes a communal grab of the mug on the table, takes a swig, and nearly spits it out. “You put whiskey in this!”

She sniffles, and then chuckles—a much-needed release. “Yeah. Sorry.” Again, she wipes her shiny face with the sleeve of her jacket. “Needed it.”

“Well, then.”

Gillian looks at him steadily.

Raff shakes his head, stares into the murky mug. Hair of the dog, he thinks grimly, and downs half of it. “Best not fuck it up.”


	5. sons and lovers

> There are really two kinds of life . . . the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.  
>  ― James Salter, _Light Years_
> 
> Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
> 
> ― Iris Murdoch
> 
>  
> 
>  

  1. _well that’s a depressing aubade_



A significant milestone in the intimate relationship between Caroline McKenzie-Dawson and Gillian Greenwood occurs on the day when a beautiful tawny brick of handmade chamomile soap is discovered in the bathroom of the latter by former whilst engaged in what is commonly referred to as a _whore’s bath._

Caroline smiles stupidly at the latticework of bubbles gathered on the plateau of the soap bar—which, she imagines, Gillian bought it from some artsy outdoor market of overpriced swag in Hebden Bridge Hippie Land—it’s so large and beautifully cumbersome she can barely wrap a hand around it, in fact, thinks she could knock someone unconscious with it. After washing up she dresses frantically, throwing on the clothes she remembered to bring into the bathroom—panties, bra, trousers—because as usual these trysts occur when she needs to be somewhere else, namely home to prepare for a Skype conference with the school’s president to make recommendations for a new teacher, and in order to do that she must beg Greg to pick up Flora from yet another yoga playdate at Padma’s, even though Greg is convinced Padma hates him, but despite all this mental wheel-spinning and thick-fingered fumbling with the side zipper of the bloody trousers she wore today, she capers with delight back to Gillian’s bedroom ridiculously elated about a bloody bar of soap.

She finds Gillian neither sleeping nor reading, but stretched out in bed rigid and regal, elegantly draped with a sheet and preternaturally still like a tomb effigy save for arms tucked casually under her head. Perhaps Gillian still ruminates on one of the bloody depressing Philip Larkin poems she’d read recently, the one about the tomb, and her body subconsciously copies the pose. So beautifully immersed in thought is she that Caroline hesitates to shatter the nimbus of that inaccessible world by saying anything. Like stumbling upon a faun in a forest glade, the silent bearing of witness to the sacred is the only option. Even as much as she wishes to insert herself, to crash the party of one: _What are you thinking, are you thinking of me?_

A creaky floorboard gives her away and Gillian bolts up in bed. Uncharacteristically demure, she holds a sheet against her chest. “Um. D-did you see it? The, the soap?”

Speculation on the profound thoughts of the farmer at rest are quickly cast aside as Caroline again grins idiotically. “Yes. Yeah. Thank you. I love how it smells. Flowery, but not too much so, you know? Where’d you get it?”

“Took Calam to the arts and crafts fair at Hebden Bridge t’other week. Bought it from some lady with gray dreadlocks nearly down to her waist.”

“Knew it.”

“D’ya think I should try that with my hair? Dreadlocks?”

“You know my feelings on white people with dreadlocks.” Caroline is rounding the corner of the bed, still fumbling with the clasp on the trousers. “Have you seen my—” She is about to say _glasses_ when a snap, a crunch, and what she assumes is a broken lens slices into her foot and her obliging brain provides a now worthless flashback to two hours ago: the casual toss of the frames on the floor after scanning and critiquing another sad Larkin poem and before opportunistically flinging herself on the farmer: _well that’s a depressing aubade, I thought they were all supposed to be romantic._

“On it!” Gillian barks, stumbles into clothes, and dashes for the bathroom as Caroline, a great wildebeest tragically felled by her own dumbassery, flops helplessly onto the bed. It takes two trips, but Gillian returns with a basin of water, various plasters and gauzes, and antiseptic.

As she lounges on the bed—a state to which she naturally gravitates—Gillian kneels in front of her and cups her calf with no-nonsense farmerly firmness. But there is certain twitchy tension about Gillian in the moment; perhaps it is because she is engaged in the delicate act of gently pulling a piece of glass out of Caroline’s stinging foot, while muttering comforting rebukes at Caroline as if she is some troublesome ewe with scours. Over the years Caroline has grown adept at parsing out specific moods from the daunting singularity of Gillian’s everyday anxiety. Today’s mood seems to be _I’m only happy when I refrain:_ An overabundance of joy—earlier, when Caroline arrived at the farm, she practically flung herself into Caroline’s arms—that exacerbates her dogged desire to please, that vigorously counteracts more troubling thoughts.

If only she knew what those thoughts were. Caroline, however, is what those in the medical profession refer to as a bad patient—at least was anointed as such during a hospital stay for appendix removal several years ago by a nurse who narrowly dodged the plastic sippy cup thrown by the obstreperous patient. In retaliation she got the worst kind of jello—green—with every meal for the remainder of her stay. As much as she likes to think she learned a lesson of sorts from that experience, the waspish wag of her tongue now lets loose.

“You don’t have to wash the entire foot,” she grumbles as swathes of warm soap water gently crisscross her wounded sole. “I showered this morning.”

Gillian wrings out a washcloth over the ancient enamel basin. Probably imagining it’s my neck, Caroline thinks. “Shut up,” she grunts.

“Ow, shit. That hurts.”

“Shut up.”

“That’s a lot of antiseptic.”

“Shut up.”

“This is how people build up resistance to antibiotics, you know.”

“Shut up.”

“You just put a plaster on. I don’t need gauze too.”

This time, before the automatic _shut up_ kicks on, Caroline sits up, leans forward, seizes Gillian by the t-shirt, and pulls her in for a kiss.

“Shut up,” Gillian manages to mumble, even as her lower lip is pleasingly snared in a trap of teeth and tongue. She deepens the kiss. An arrow of desire plunges straight down through to her cunt as Gillian surges forth, pushes her back onto the bed, pins her wrists to the mattress. In this position, her body a cage of protean capabilities, Gillian enthralls, teases, dominates.

On the long, flood-soaked weekend when they started up again, Gillian took many opportunities to drive her mad; bringing her to the point of orgasm, gently withdrawing, killing time with another delirious circuit of foreplay around her body. Then the subtle precision of fucking: The coil of her fingers inside Caroline, a violinist holding the tremulous, transitory pitch of an epic chord. And laying claim where few had dared: _When you’re here, you’re mine. You belong to me._ Every time she sets foot in this house, every time she lies in this bed, the words are with her.

So while she half-expects Gillian to jam a hand down her trousers for a final obliging fuck, Caroline is also accustomed to a certain amount of sexual caprice in their relationship and is not surprised when she abruptly rolls off and fixes Caroline with a glittering stare through a curtain of wild hair.

“You looked like you want to ask me something,” Gillian mumbles.

“Did I?”

“When I was fixing your hoof.”

Caroline chortles. “My hoof indeed.” Her hand drifts through Gillian’s hair. “I was just wondering: Is everything all right?”

“Yeah.” Gillian glances away, perhaps too quickly, and pulls at a loose string on the blanket. “I’ll miss you, is all.”

“I’m only gone for the weekend.” After the conference call with the school board this afternoon, she is driving down to Oxford, ostensibly for an alumnae weekend but also with the very obvious purpose of embarrassing William with her overwhelmingly maternal presence. She hasn’t seen Will in months; he spent his summer interning at some ultra-hip posh mag based in London presumably aimed at mostly young men with pots of disposable income.

Gillian smiles absently, her finger traces a gnarled bit of cross-stitch of the blanket. “Yeah, no. It’s good for you to get away a bit. I know you haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I consider it an intervention of sorts as well.” Caroline pauses for effect. “He told me he’s writing a novel.”

“Hell’s bells.” Gillian’s sputtering laugh ignites a shared fit of giggles.

“I know.”

“Just like his dad.”

“ _I know._ ”

“Got your work cut out for you then,” Gillian says briskly, and bolts out of the bed.

The unexpected—and disappointing—departure leaves Caroline once again ready to ask another helpless question, but before she can even find her voice Gillian is halfway down the steps and yelling about putting the kettle on.

 

 

  1. _frailty and consequence_



The provenance of the tiny Fiat in Caroline’s driveway is unknown and, given the fact that the puny vehicle is attempting to cockblock her formidable Jeep Cherokee, highly annoying. Still, she manages to park beside it. Caroline wonders if the owner is some geriatric Am Dram person visiting Celia and Alan; recently, her mother has inexplicably developed a perplexing and alarming interest in the theater, and Caroline worries that the sliver of free time she possesses in her overburdened life will now be divvyed up among one lover who feeds her too much pasta, another who needs no excuse to shag in a motor vehicle, and fifth-rate performances of Wilde and Shaw. Given that her romantic life has shaped up to be third-rate French farce material, it all seems rather fitting.

She would gladly storm the guesthouse to abuse the owner of the Fiat save for the fact that she has Greg on the mobile and is immersed in the delicate negotiations of co-parenting—the initial stage, as usual with Greg, involves assuaging his baby-bird like sensitivities.

“Padma does not hate you,” she says while slipping out of the Jeep. “The other week she was talking about civilized our living situation is.”

Greg sighs. “That doesn’t mean she likes me.”

“At the very least it means she respects you. She knows what a raving bitch I am and that all the harmony and hemp products in our loving household come from you.”

“So Padma knows you are the one responsible for Flora saying the f-word?” During a recent yoga playdate Flora slipped while doing downward dog and squawked out a frustrated _fuck._

Because the worst f-words out of Greg’s mouth are usually _fudge_ or _fishsticks,_ she knows he’s probably right. Still, she is firmly in denial mode and jabs defensively at the air with house keys. “We don’t know that to be an established fact. There’s that chavvy assistant at the nursery school—”

“Caroline,” Greg says in the wearily patient tone of a man parenting not only a four-year-old but a foul-mouthed, wine-pickled middle-aged twat, “we’ve discussed use of that word, and you know it’s not very nice.”

“Are you saying that _chavvy_ is worse than _fuck_?”

“Both are, um, not ideal.”

Now inside the sanctuary of the house, she sighs and leans heavily against the door. “Yeah. Right. But you know what?”

“What?”

“You might as well face the fact that I’m never going to say the right thing. Ever. To anyone.”

“Oh, fishsticks,” he scoffs gently. “You’re doing all right. We’re doing all right. Flora’s going to be a very smart, well-loved, talented, beautiful—and foul-mouthed young woman.”

With that, he agrees to pick up Flora later and again she marvels at how decent people always give her the benefit of the doubt. She barely has time for further self-excoriation and a trip to the loo—the mirror in the bathroom always a righteous tool in the art of emotional evisceration—when the combination of a knock and a ringing of the doorbell prompts a fear that Celia has brought around some Am Dram queen of indeterminate gender and lavender-tinted, Quentin Crispian bearing for tea.

Instead, when she opens the door she finds herself staring at Raff, more specifically, his broad, military-jacketed back as he waves at his grandfather, who is silhouetted in the door of the guesthouse. Caroline now remembers that recently Ellie purchased a “new” car—a fifteen-year-old Fiat that Gillian has already fixed twice, and that is presumably the vehicle in her driveway now. But there is no sign of Ellie or Calamity.

Ellie’s purchase of the Fiat had made Gillian unexpectedly nostalgic; one afternoon over lunch she spoke dreamily of her old mate Antje, who had owned a Fiat, and how they went “everywhere” the summer that Antje bought the car, and Caroline had to remind herself that Antje was not really the one that fifteen-year-old Gillian had fallen madly in love with—at least not consciously.

“See ya, granddad,” Raff bellows cheerfully.

With a final vigorous wave and a shout of _hello, love!_ at Caroline, Alan closes the door and the curtain drops on Raff’s doting grandson performance. He turns to face her, and in the stormy grace of that turn and the feral flatline of his mouth, resembles his mother in a full flight of fury so much that she wants to laugh. But doesn’t, because she strongly suspects that she is reason for this display.

“You need to _shit_ or get off the pot,” he snarls.

Now she knows she is the reason. She imagines that Gillian finally broke down and told him. Was _that_ why Gillian seemed odd today? _Why didn’t she fucking tell me?_

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Raff—”

“No.” Raff’s hand flares up in warning. “I’m not _having a chat_ about this. All right? I’ll say my piece and go, yeah? I know she’s a grown-up and all that, she makes her own decisions. But I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing her messed about. And as far as I’m concerned that’s what you’re doing. ’Cause you’re still seeing that other woman, aren’t ya? And you think it’s all right, just ’cause she says so? You know damn well she’d say anything, do anything to keep you happy.” He shakes his head. “I thought you were different. That you had standards you kept to. But you’re not. You’re no different than th’ other dickheads she’s been with.”

He’s nearly halfway to the Fiat when Caroline snaps out of her stunned stupor and resorts to headmistress barking: “Raff!”

To her surprise, it works. He stops.

Then she begs: “Please. Come in.”

Inside he sits stiffly at the kitchen table as she makes tea. Their steaming cups sit at opposite ends of the table, goalies ensnared on a ghostly wooden pitch in a game of silence.

Caroline sits, touches the cup and cannot decide which is more scathing: The tea or his face. “She told you.”

Raff shakes his head. “I saw you two kissing. The other week when you were there, and I’d spent the night. You were both outside. Could see from my bedroom window. Weren’t spying or anything, just heard noise, looked out, and—” He shrugs. “I thought maybe she were just going about being an idiot, like she does sometimes. You know, picking the wrong person, not thinking about the consequences. So I went off on her a bit, but talking to her I found out something.”

“And what is that?”

“She loves you.”

Eight years ago, on vacation with John and the boys in Italy, they all went swimming at a ravine in Sardinia. Maybe it was the wine, maybe she was trying to prove to her sons and her idiot husband that she was not completely naff, but she dove—albeit from a modest height—into the water, a terrific and terrifying plunge, a cold sharp shock that brought life into fleeting focus among the shaded granite that glistened gold and pink and the scent of juniper trees that filled her lungs as she came up for air.

This truth, systemically denied for so long, takes similar hold.

“She didn’t say in so many words,” Raff continues. “But the way she looks at you and talks about you—it’s not like it’s ever been with anyone else, that I’ve seen before. Not even with Robbie. And probably not—” His mouth shifts, his voice thickens. “—well, definitely not with my dad.”

The conversation takes an unexpected turn and if Caroline is monumentally unprepared to talk about Gillian, she is even less prepared to follow the darkened thread of Eddie Greenwood through his son’s life. But the tug of the Minotaur upon this thread cannot be denied, so she’ll just have to hang on for dear life.

“Been thinking about him lately. I guess maybe now that I’m a dad, I think more about these things.” He nudges the saucer of the teacup. “I don’t remember much of him, what he were like. He were big, though. I remember that. And sometimes—” Raff stops, his voice breaking slightly. “—sometimes I felt—afraid of him. And if _I_ felt that way—” He winces, does not want to contemplate it further for a second, but pushes forth. “He hurt her, didn’t he?”

The second hard truth of the day is easier to confront, if only because it involves a dead man who brought forth only one good thing in his life: the young man sitting across the table from her. “Yes.”

“She won’t tell me about—any of it. About him.”

“Because you don’t need to know,” Caroline says it with ease, because she truly believes what she says. “Because it doesn’t matter.”

Raff, however, unnerves with a challenging stare. “What if it matters to me?”

She holds his gaze, reaches across the table, and takes his hand. “If you push her on this,” she says slowly, “it will break her.”

He looks away.

She does not know how long they sit there. She forgets time; the work phone call, the children on play dates or at fancy universities or finding themselves adrift in the world. There is only the incremental movement of daylight along the kitchen table stalking the glazed teacups and consecrating the intermingling of their hands.

With a long, strong squeeze of her hand, Raff lets go. The weariness on display as he stands seems new; a nascent strain of adulthood now infects him. He rolls his shoulders—another Gillian-like bit of physicality.

“I’ve got to go,” he says. “Need to get th’ car back to Ellie. She’s got a shift at store later.”

His farewell nod seals a pact of understanding between them. Then he is gone.

For several minutes Caroline stares at the dark wasted tea on the table. The mobile rings. The developments of the day merit a different kind of f-word.

“Fudgesticks,” she says.

 

  1. _perpetual sunset is rather an unsettling thing_



Oxford, interlaced with strata of memories, confronts Caroline with the hard work of mental excavations. The college itself is comforting, unchanging; the town, however, is different. The hole-in-the-wall gay club she first went to nearly thirty years ago is gone, has been gone for some time now, suffering through ignominious transformations into a frozen yogurt shop, a falafel stand, a massage studio, and now a bank. The fancy Italian restaurant where John proposed to her is now a craft brewery. The dark cul-de-sac where she kissed a woman for the first time now thrives with art galleries and tourist shops. But the croquet lawn where she first encountered the black dog on a misty hungover morning remains, despite the pastoral gilt of summer’s end, vast and faintly terrifying.

And the pub on the river near the Port Meadow, where she meets William and his new girlfriend for dinner, is still very much the same, although the dinner menu now offers vegan options.

William has, at last, shaven off the atrocious beard he grew a few months ago. The new girlfriend is Lauren: American, terribly tan even in late September, energetic, quick to mention a gay uncle and a passel of queer friends, and—this endearing her even more to Caroline—glances at her mobile only once during the course of the hour-long meal. After a post-dinner coffee she’s off to meet with a study group at Balliol Library, leaving William with a chaste peck on the cheek and Caroline with a sweatily effusive handshake.

Afterward she walks with William on a riverside pathway, the Isis darkly shimmering and languid under the auspices of the autumn equinox; it feels later than it is, the only explanation for why she is stunned by the unexpected, contemplative warmth of sunset.

Sensing her distractedness, William chatters nervously about his classes, his friends. Caroline had anticipated awkwardness between them. She talks with him every week and he endures her barrages of texts with his usual humor and patience, but her son is growing into himself and, while the bond they have retains its strength, it will change regardless of what the hell she thinks or wants. Just like the town itself, just like the past, endlessly shifting underfoot.

Finally William busts out with the question he’s wanted to ask since they left the pub: “Do you like her?”

“I felt as if she were interviewing to be your girlfriend.”

“So you _do_ like her.”

“Yep. She aced it.”

“Really? I know how much you liked Roxy.”

“I did, I did. But I wasn’t expecting you to be with her forever. You’re young, far too early for you to settle down. You should make hay and all that.”

His hum elides into the syllable starting a gently mocking echo: “Make hay. That doesn’t seem like you.”

“Isn’t it? You should have fun. I married too young—”

“Late twenties. Not too young, I don’t think.” William treads carefully: “Your problem was more who you married.”

“If I hadn’t married him, you wouldn’t be here. So you should thank me for my internalized homophobia, the gift that keeps on giving.”

He laughs, shakes his head.

“Have you heard from him? Your dad?” After Caroline blocked his number on her mobile, John took to relaying recrimination either via Celia or William—while sparing his favored younger son from his whining. Despite her innate shit-stirring tendencies even Celia tired of his messages and blocked him too, but William, ever the dutiful son, remained in touch.

“Still has a few weeks left in rehab. Keeps saying stuff about making amends.”

“That’s the therapy talking.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“If he means it, yeah.”

Caroline’s foot starts to throb; stupidly, she finally understands that Gillian put so much gauze on the foot in order to cushion it. Luckily they are on a picturesque little wooden bridge, so it’s a perfect moment to stop and take in the wide swath of sunset on the river. Here in Oxford some thirty years ago, she had discovered herself. Then lost herself again surrendering to a dream not her own, the collective delusions her mother shared with the world at large. Here she is, older, no wiser, the sunset troublingly steady as it reminds her that it’s later than she thinks.

Is it worth working so fucking hard to keep at something so seemingly unstable and transitory? Especially when it was so exhausting, and the reward so minimal in comparison? It all flowed turbulently, even while statistically stationary. If only your fucked-up love triangle could work like fluid dynamics, she berates herself. But perhaps she had misaligned the elements of the equation all along.

There is great ease and joy in being with Gillian. Most people would interpret this as a positive, but Caroline has always kicked the gift horse squarely in the mouth. Anything or anyone worth having is difficult to obtain: An Oxford degree, a successful career, a spotless kitchen, a mask of respectability—not to mention Kate McKenzie. That a woman so blatantly unsuited to her in every way could make her feel happy and relaxed confounded the complexities of Caroline’s belief system.

Christ, she thinks, and rubs her forehead.

William’s brow furrows with worry. “You’ve got a headache?”

“No. Just overthinking things as usual.”

“Do you need an aspirin? Some water?”

“Actually, I should’ve had that second glass of wine at dinner.”

He chuckles, fidgets, and, after a suitable pause, finally puts forth the second nosy question he’s been dying to ask. “So. How’s everything going with Jennifer?”

She is amused that her very proper son still refers to Sacha by her very proper Christian name. “Fine.”

“Ah. Good.” William stares bashfully at his feet.

She smiles at his nervous transparency. “Any particular reason why you’re asking?”

“Well, you get to ask about my love life, don’t I get to ask about yours?”

“No,” she deadpans in an obvious enough way that they both laugh.

“All right, all right. Just curious.” William nibbles at his lower lip. “Dylan always likes to talk shit about his mum, so it’s hard to know what to think sometimes.”

Speaking of shit-stirring, Caroline thinks. Darkly beautiful Dylan must make a lot of people on the vast spectrum of gender and sexual identity very unhappy. “What kind of shit?”

William groans. “I shouldn’t say.”

“You’ve started it, you may as well finish it.”

“He said he didn’t think it was going well between you two. He was thinking his mum was, seeing other women and was, as he put it, ‘reverting to form.’”

“And what form might that be? Gas or liquid?”

“Can always rely on you for a good chem joke, mum.” William leans against the bridge. “I didn’t know at first that she, um—was not into traditional relationships. It was only after you two started dating that Dylan mentioned it. I was all like, ‘thanks for letting me know, mate.’”

“Jennifer—Sacha—is who she is, and I accept that, and I’ve been working with that.”

William scrunches his face into a wince that Caroline usually associates with his intense dislike of courgettes. “Is it what you really want, though?”

“No,” she admits. She could say nothing further, let Sacha look like the bad guy in her son’s eyes. Sighing heavily, she relents. “Look, Will. It’s not her. It’s me. I’ve been seeing someone else.”

The wheels of his mind spin beautifully, and obviously, on William’s face. “Oh God no, Mum,” he blurts.

“What?”

“It’s Gillian. Isn’t it? You’re seeing her again.”

 _Why do you have to be so fucking smart?_ Caroline wants to scream; instead she only gawps stupidly. “How did you—”

“It makes sense. Every time I talk to you, you’re either on your way to the farmhouse, or coming back from it, or you’re actually _there._ ”

Ironically, the one person who has noticed this is the one person who no longer lives in Yorkshire.

“I thought we agreed,” William adds primly, as if he is a minor busybody in a Jane Austen novel, “that seeing her wasn’t good for you.”

“‘We’ didn’t agree on anything.”

“You said back then you got involved with her for the wrong reasons.”

“Well, maybe I’m involved with her now for the right reasons.”

At a conversational deadlock, they pretend to enjoy the perfect view.

He sighs. “I guess I just don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?”

“She’s just—so different from you,” William says slowly. “You’ve nothing in common, really. I mean, she’s never gone to university, she’s just, you know, a farmer—”

“I didn’t raise you to be a snob.”

Sardonic, William chortles. “Didn’t you?” He gestures around them, open palms encompassing the ancient expanse of the meadow under the protection and care of the great, prosperious university. “Look at where we are. Where you’ve been preparing me to go all my life.” He frowns, and relents. “If this is what you want, I’m happy for you. I suppose it may take me a bit to wrap my head around it all. Because you’re still seeing—”

“No,” Caroline replies, and everything falls into place.

“No?”

“I’m going to end it. With Sacha.”

“Really?”

The river Isis, known as the Thames further along in its coursings and murmurings through the country, ferries molten tones of vermillion and silver and white into the infinite and her mind finally cadges a moment of peace in an otherwise hectic and eventful day.

She draws a deep breath. “Yeah.”

William sighs melodramatically.

Caroline shoots him a steely glare.

“This is going to make my Majorca trip with Dylan at the end of term really awkward.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Philip Larkin poetry:
> 
> [Aubade](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07)
> 
>  
> 
> [An Arundel Tomb](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb)
> 
>  
> 
> The title of section 3 is nicked from Stephen Sondheim's _A Little Night Music._


	6. the counterfeit moth

> ****The trails of light which they [moths] seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals . . . were merely phantom tracks . . . the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.
> 
>  —W.G. Sebald, _Austerlitz_

 

The first highlight of Gillian’s Caroline-free weekend occurs at 10:46 pm on Sunday night, when she discovers an unopened box of currant biscuits hidden high up in a cupboard, far away from her sugar-manic granddaughter. Wobbling dangerously atop an old footstool that has already seen two superglue repairs, she retrieves the box and shuffles back to the comfort of couch and telly.

Saturday saw heavy punishing rain that transformed the most mundane of farm chores into a muddy endurance course. And that was just the morning. Later that day she had two back-to-back shifts at the store because she was everyone’s go-to for covering weekend shifts, probably because as both a farmer and someone completely lacking a social life, weekends were a rather meaningless construct. Before she left for the store, she sat cross-legged on a hay bale in the barn alternating a forlorn gaze between the glittering, beaded curtain of rain outside and her silent mobile, hoping that Caroline might text something other than a photo of herself with William, who looked like every inch the twee academic now with his baggy corduroys, navy blue blazer, and crisp white shirt. If he started wearing a bowtie, that would be the end of him.

Around six-thirty the next morning, while nursing a minor hangover and a large mug of tea, she nearly fell off the kitchen chair when the mobile actually rang. It was not Caroline but Alan, apologetically asking if Greg and Flora could come along for Sunday dinner; apparently their plans for the day with Greg’s fickle new girlfriend had fallen through, so Alan had felt bad and invited him—

Like the idiot heroine in a bad horror film—with an imaginary camera zooming in on her terrified face—Gillian echoed dumbly, “Sunday dinner?” _They can’t be serious._

“Well, yes,” Alan rumbled peevishly. “Celia and me will be there usual time, and Raff and Calamity and Harry too, not sure if Ellie will make it—”

She could not fathom Sunday dinner without Caroline. Not just because Caroline seemed—eternal thanks to the _Godfather_ movies—the unofficial head of the family, but also because over the past couple of months, this beautiful control freak had finally tired of Gillian’s half-arsed cooking and ceaseless complaints and actually _made_ Sunday dinner every bloody week. _Just keep my glass full and chop the vegetables, all right?_ she would usually mutter while grabbing an apron and steering Gillian over to a cutting board.

“It’s all right, isn’t it?” Alan said. “You can handle it?”—a blustery Celia-esque comment if there ever was one—bloody woman is such a shit influence on him, Gillian thought—indicating that if she could not handle it, she was indeed a profound failure as a woman.

“Sure.” Gillian’s exaggerated drawl lobbed a verbal water balloon of passive-aggressiveness back at her old man. “No worries.”

“You’re certain?”

“It’ll be the best roast of your life.”

Alan chortled. “Let’s not get carried away, love.”

She rang off, said _fuck_ five times in the faint hope that it would conjure forth a spell or enchantment that would release her from Sunday dinner—both the preparing and attendance of—and then the mobile pinged. It was Caroline. Well, it was Caroline texting a photo of the sunrise from her hotel room. The windows of the room looked tiny, almost garret-like, but they opened up on the horizon of dawn that stretched up from a skyline of low buildings along High Street and beyond, radiant orange burning the dawn-blue sky. She wondered if Caroline took the photo while lying in bed, but the angle wasn’t quite low enough. Perhaps she was sitting up in bed with a morning coffee, wearing silky pajamas, her hair sleep-tousled, and with a sly half-smile tugging at her mouth, as if she kept the best part of dreams to herself upon waking.

Gillian interpreted the photo as the proof that she was in Caroline’s mind at the day’s first light. But then the photo could have been sent to Sacha as well. Or even to Greg, so that he could show it to Flora. Do we ever really know the people we think we love? Gillian thought. And if we did, would it really change anything?

As she jealously brooded upon this, Caroline followed the photo with an actual text: _Did you survive the rain all right?_ Meaning, were there sheep floating away down river on top of a tractor?

Gillian replied _all good._ After that, they chatted about William, and then Gillian vented at length about the innate absurdity and excessive labor of the Sunday dinner ritual. If she had hoped for sympathy in the form of lingerie pics—not a thing that has ever happened, but as a wanker on the dole yearns for a winning lottery ticket, so she yearns for lingerie pics—hell, she would even settle for a smattering of dirty talk, instead she got Caroline-splained on the functions and malfunctions of her ancient stove: _Your oven gets hot really quick I suggest lowering temp about 10 degrees and cooking roast 15 min. longer so you don’t burn it this time._

 _So my oven is like your twat?_ Gillian texted back.

Caroline resisted the bait. _Have fun! I’m having breakfast with seven chemists soon._

Of course she ignored the advice and of course she burnt the fucking roast. Well accustomed to her culinary mishaps, Harry, Raff, and her dad tucked in without complaint. Greg and Calamity, the latter a little vegetarian in training thanks to her mum, contentedly ate potatoes and salad. Flora made an impressive pyramid with a stack of green beans and she could see why Caroline thought the girl would end up a brilliant architect. Celia sighed loudly, poked listlessly at the meat on her plate, and rolled her eyes with such ferocity that Gillian expected them to drop out of her head and land on the plate as if she were a representation of Saint Lucy come to life.

After dinner, Greg cleaned up in the kitchen, Harry and the grandparents entertained the children, and Raff came out with her to the barn, ostensibly to work on the bookshelf, but she knew he was more interested in continuing the interrogation—he called it a _conversation_ —begun the day that he found out about her and Caroline. She reckoned he had a right to know some things about her life, particularly in light of the one thing she could but would never reveal to him. Although she hoped answering his questions might bring them closer, the fact remained that poring over the past and speculating on the future scraped her nerves into hollow points: like the bullets, maximum damage occurred on impact.

Her monosyllabic responses, however, had not discouraged him the other week:

_How old when you when you knew?_

_Teenager. Maybe 13, 14._

_Have you told anyone else?_

_No. Well, my best mate at school knew._

_Did you—have you—with other women?_

_Long time ago, before I married your dad. So no one you know._

_Is this why we watched those naff old_ Tomb Raider _movies with Angelina Jolie?_  

_Have to have some enjoyment in life, don’t I?_

_You gonna tell Grandad eventually?_

She was taking her turn driving in a post when he asked that and, with the litany of questions finally getting to her— _no one expects the Sapphic Inquisition!_ —she brought down the maul with such force that even though the post split badly enough to render it useless, she was momentarily impressed with her sad, middle-aged body.

As was Raff, who had a good laugh. _Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?_

Today, as they put primer on the shelves, Raff picked up from where he left off: “I think Grandad would be okay with it. I mean, he’s all right with Cazza. Loves her like his own. Stands to reason he would be all right with you, an’ you two being together.”

Gillian thought of Julia’s stories about her posh, armchair progressive parents and their Labour Party functions—and who both recoiled in horror at having a lesbian daughter. Then there was James’s arty, quasi-bohemian family, who kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen. “It’s different when you find out it’s one of your own.”

“I don’t think he’s like that,” Raff retorted quietly. 

“Yeah, probably.” Gillian dragged a hand over her face. “But then he’s not really the problem, and you know that.”

She didn’t need to say who the problem was.

Before they went back inside she once again made the lad swore he would not say a word to anyone. He shrugged noncommittally, which panicked her a bit and made her think he’d already said something to Ellie, but then remembered he and Ellie were barely on speaking terms these days.

After everyone left she remembered that they had forgotten to bring the maul back to the barn the other week. It was probably still lying somewhere near the fence, unless her neighbor Pete had discovered it and nicked it—she saw him motoring about in those parts a couple days ago—and once he had it she’d probably never see it again. She expected nothing less from Pete; the bastard still had a generator of hers that he borrowed years ago. Accompanied by Steve McQueen, she walked the length of the repaired fence, expanded the search outward, could not find the maul, assumed Pete got it—then found it by tripping over it and falling arse over tit into a ditch.

For several minutes she lay there, staring up at the sky, taking note of the pain blossoming in her knee and Steve staring down at her from the edge of the slope, tail wagging, chastising her with gentle barks that sounded to her like a looped recording of _knobhead_.  

All the way home she rhythmically swung the maul around her as if auditioning for the role of Thor, although frankly she would rather audition to be the filling in a Thor and Valkyrie sandwich; at any rate, it was a useful distraction from the pain in the knee. Steve eyed her suspiciously and waddled at a safe distance. Once home she surrendered to pajamas, wine, telly, and an icepack in the form of a package of frozen peas.

So when 11:00 pm rolls along, she is contentedly buzzed from half a bottle of pinot noir and stuffing her face with currant biscuits while watching an old Michael Powell film: _I Know Where I’m Going!_ She finds it a bit slow and draggy, but the Scottish scenery is grand, as is Roger Livesey’s magnificent aquiline profile, so she thinks it will make a fine lullaby for falling asleep half-drunk on a wrecked old couch.

Then light from a car’s headlamps float across the living room wall and Gillian sits up, heart racing furiously, as someone unannounced comes up the drive to the farmhouse. Frantically limping to the door, she grabs the maul that she had propped there earlier and hits the outdoor light. It’s not possible, she thinks, but the vehicle now sitting in the driveway looks like Caroline’s Jeep Cherokee. Indeed, it is Caroline getting out of the Jeep and walking toward the house. Blood roars through her head. Something must be wrong. William? Her father? She flings open the door in time to find Caroline on the stoop.

Caroline looks stunned, as if the journey from Oxford to Halifax occurred via magic carpet and not overpriced SUV. Briefly Gillian wonders if she is high, who knows what happens in Oxford, maybe “breakfast with chemists” was code for something, anyway, what is it with knobheads showing up high at her house at all hours? She half-expects Caroline to announce that Jez is in the backseat, high off his tits with a serious case of the munchies.

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry,” Caroline says breathlessly, closes her eyes a moment, and presses a fist clutching car keys to her forehead. “I didn’t think how late it was.”

“W-what’s—wrong?” Still contemplating death and disaster, Gillian finally forces out this, a five-second aria of hysteria, her voice strangling its way into a higher octave.

“I’m sorry, really. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s all right, everyone’s fine.”

Now that Gillian has confirmation that no one is dead, she is free to briefly ogle Caroline’s tight jeans, envy the necklace that dipped into the low v-neck of her t-shirt and the cashmere cardigan that hugged her body—was that new?

“I—well, I just wanted to tell you—” Caroline shifts her weight nervously and, taking a moment to gather herself, gazes down—and blurts out, “Jesus Christ.”

She’s looking at the maul in Gillian’s hand.

“Oh.” Gillian tucks the maul out of sight into a corner. “Sorry.”

Caroline remains poised on the threshold, unwilling to move because she is intent on delivering a message that would otherwise be hopelessly lost in translation or transit if she set foot into the familiar warmth of the farmhouse, the indisputable domain of the farmer.

“I did a lot of thinking this weekend,” she says. “You were right, it was good to get away, it helped clear my head a bit. I had to admit some things to myself.”

Gillian knows this one: The preamble of a breakup speech, heard or said a dozen times to or from various tossers. She probably even recited similar shit to Robbie months ago: _I’ve been thinking, blah blah blah._ Awaiting the inevitable blow, and blindly seeking support from the doorframe, Gillian bows her head.

“I think you’ve been right all along. I’ve been trying so hard to be someone different, something I’m not, making choices about things I’m not sure I really want, so—” Caroline stops. She is the master of the dramatic pause, possibly one of the less annoying traits picked up from her mother, although it is surely fucking annoying at the present moment and only a miracle of self-restraint prevents Gillian from filling the dramatic void by screaming _how many fucking times are you going to break my heart?_

The blow, delivered not by maul but feather, is not what she expects: “I’m going to stop seeing Sacha.”

Must be really drunk, Gillian thinks—then, slowly, she raises her head. “D-did I hear right?”

“Yeah. I’m breaking up with her.”

“With Sacha.”

“Yes.” It sinks in so slowly that she can barely absorb the remainder of what Caroline says: “I know this has been hard for you. I know that. But I’ve realized I’m happy with what we have together, you and I. Whatever this is, it works—it works for me and I hope, I really really hope, that it does for you too. I don’t _need_ someone else, I don’t need more. And—I don’t know what the future would be, will be. But if you’re happy too, then I’d like us to continue. Is this—” Caroline sways wearily, as the force of the declaration coupled with driving almost nonstop for over three hours and possibly rethinking everything a hundred times, not to mention the small but significant fear that Gillian is not simpatico with any of this, hits her all at once, and she winds down quietly, shakily: “—is this something you want?”

Gillian can’t even pretend to contemplate. There is no choice to make, only continuation of the path she recklessly set herself upon so many years ago now, when she first noticed the edge of desire limning the flinty way Caroline looked at her sometimes, the first in a long concatenation of looks and touches. She mumbles a _yes_ that, as far as she is concerned, need not even be said, an affirmation that flutters through the air as daring and soft as the abundant moths bounding around the porch light.

Caroline, ever practical, needs it—if not somehow delicately encoded in a formula on an Excel spreadsheet, then said loud enough to hear. “Yeah?”

Gillian nods. And that will do.

The keys are still in Caroline’s left hand as she goes in for the kiss and Gillian feels a hard plastic fob and soft fingertips against the back of her neck. Caroline’s lips have the strange slick, neutral taste of lipstick, gliding warm against her own lips, and in a few adroit moves she teases and traps Gillian’s tongue into the glimmering warmth of her mouth. Gillian grabs her hips, pulls her closer, then slides a hand up Caroline’s shirt and rests it against her belly. Before she can go exploring further, Caroline moans and ends the kiss. Errant moths weave electric around her golden head; with the naked eye, Gillian can almost trace their incandescent paths. She envies their revelry, would join them if she could, but she would be no mere moth. Now she fancies herself consort of a queen—the butterfly in disguise, inverting the accepted properties of beauty and worth, a counterfeit moth.

She senses Caroline’s tiredness and feels no shame in taking advantage of it because she craves the physical as confirmation of the emotional and needs to taste Caroline’s skin, feel her weight, and watch for points of lights, the distant stars mapped in the constellation of her gaze. She clasps both hands around Caroline’s wrists, and nuzzles her face—kissing her cheek, forehead, eyebrows, eyelids.

“Stay,” Gillian says.

Caroline rests a heavy head on her shoulder, presses her wet mouth to Gillian’s throat, feasting on the beating pulse within. “Can’t.”

She knows, of course, all the reasons why: Work, child, nosy parent.  

Straightening, Caroline rouses herself with a deep breath. “We’ll talk—tomorrow? If you’re not too busy?” As Gillian hums reluctant agreement, she risks reigniting the fire with a firm but decisively quick kiss. “Goodnight.”

Gillian watches her walk back to the Jeep and settle behind the wheel. With a smile and a wave, she is gone. Her departure is witnessed by the farmer and the dive-bombing coterie of moths until the red lights of the Jeep dissolve into green-black night.

Inside, she ends the moth rave by shutting off the porch light. She paces the kitchen in ever tightening circles, says _fuck_ a string of times, and sinks into a chair, because dragging on the coattails of what just occurred are all the old fears— _careful what you wish for, you’ll fuck it up, you don’t deserve it, you never did, you never will_ —all of it clamors in her head persistent as moths, their trails visible but for a moment but always indelible in the mind.   

Steve McQueen, who has finally decided to see what all the fuss was about, ambles into the kitchen. Not even the bloody dog witnessed this, Gillian thinks.

Still, she puts the question to him: “Did that just happen?”

Steve’s tail thumps uneasily against the floor. Is the crazy old bint going to take him out to herd at midnight? Good thing he finished off the biscuits she left on the sofa. He trots over and drops his damp muzzle in his mistress’s lap, drooling contentedly.


End file.
